Berman and Ross weren’t the only ones who related to Marcie Ross, the shy murderer. Alyson Hannigan, who played Buffy’s wild-smart and covertly powerful best friend Willow, also empathized with the invisible villain.
Willow can probably relate to Marcie more than any other member of the Scooby gang when we meet her in the first season. She is also nerdy, but she has a friend in Xander — and then Buffy of course — so she doesn’t suffer the same affliction as Marcie. Willow also attracts negative attention from Cordelia, while Marcie attracts no attention at all. The characters’ similarities and differences aside, Hannigan felt personally connected to Marcie by her own teenage experience.
“Having not had a good experience in my personal high school life, to be able to be part of a show that reflects that — it just resonated so profoundly with me,” she told a Comic-Con audience in 2017 (per The Guardian). “I was just over the moon to have been a part of it. […] it was like, ‘Oh my God’. I thought, ‘Joss [Whedon, series creator] saw me in high school.'”
DuVall also related to her character, even in her brief experience on the “Buffy” set. The actor was still new to the industry and felt like a total outsider. “I think I was maybe 18 or 19 when we shot it,” she recalled in an interview with The A.V. Club in 2016. “I was nervous and very shy, but really related to that character so much because I am a shy person. I am an introvert. I was so taken with the sensitivity and the emotion in that role.”