When Michelle Trachtenberg suddenly appeared among the already-familiar cast members of Joss Whedon’s much-loved turn-of-the-21st-century TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, at the beginning of the fifth season, no one knew what to make of her. For one thing, her character, Dawn, was a young teenager who’d emerged from nowhere, though the implication was that she was the younger sister of the show’s heroine, Buffy Summers, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, and that she’d been there all along. Who knew Buffy had a younger sister? Exactly no one, and yet suddenly there Dawn was, eager to be accepted by her older, cooler sister and that sister’s gang of older, cooler friends. I remember that first episode with Dawn: she was an outsider, an interloper, among a group of characters who already meant a great deal to me. She was annoying. I didn’t want her hanging out with Buffy and her friends. I wanted her to just go away.
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That feeling didn’t last long, and Whedon’s gamble—that we too would come to accept this character as family—paid off. Trachtenberg’s Dawn was so full of life, so adorably awkward and insecure, so meltingly vulnerable, that no matter how aggravating she could be, it would have been unthinkable to shut her out. If you were Dawn’s age, you related to her; if you were older, you felt, as Buffy did, protective of her. That was the magic of Michelle Trachtenberg, who died on Feb. 26 at age 39. Her presence in early 2000s TV—later, she would play the scheming socialite Georgina Sparks on Gossip Girl—exemplifies the hold that even secondary characters can have on us. You don’t have to be the star of the show to earn viewers’ affection and loyalty, as Trachtenberg did.
Read more: Michelle Trachtenberg’s Co-Stars Pay Tribute in the Wake of Her Death
Her career had begun long before she found her way to Buffy: She’d been doing TV commercials since the age of three, and had been a regular on the Nickelodeon show The Adventures of Pete & Pete. At 10, she made her film debut in Harriet the Spy (1996). Post-Buffy, she played supporting roles in films like Greg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2005), Burr Steers’ 17 Again (2009) and Kevin Smith’s Cop Out (2010), though her finest hour in the movie realm may be Jeff Schaffer, Alec Berg, and David Mandel’s delightful teen comedy Eurotrip (2004), a seemingly throwaway picture upon its release that’s now considered a not-so-secret classic. Trachtenberg plays Jenny, one-half of a set of twins who, along with some boisterous male buddies, sets off on a summer tour of Europe. The mishaps pile up: the kids get their money stolen, and realize they’re stuck in Prague with only $1.83, in American dollars, between them. Whatever will they do? Cut to Trachtenberg’s Jenny in a luxurious spa bubble bath, making the most of a preposterously favorable exchange rate.
Trachtenberg, with her sunny demeanor and sly timing, was a marvelous presence in Eurotrip—it’s a shame she didn’t get to do more comedies. And if her years on Buffy were the high point of her career, in retrospect they carry a sting: several of Trachtenberg’s fellow actresses on the show, among them Charisma Carpenter, have in recent years accused Whedon of behaving inappropriately, and often cruelly, on set. It became a rule among the women that Trachtenberg, the youngest of them, must never be left alone with Whedon. They felt protective of her, just as the rest of us felt protective of her character. Even so, as a performer Trachtenberg radiated more than just vulnerability. She was a joyous presence too. As Dawn, she was rapturous reminder of our own adolescent enthusiasms, our eagerness to figure out our place in the world, our frustration at not being included in the activities of our older, cooler siblings and their friends. Trachtenberg spent the bulk of her teenage years playing Dawn: some Buffy fans grew up with her, while others, like me, merely watched her grow up. Either way, those years are a reminder of the gifts actors leave with us, even if, in those years of just showing up on set one day after another, they were unaware they were giving us anything at all.