Kristine Sutherland

A handful of screen roles, then a second career in portrait and documentary photography, plus recent Buffy podcast conversations.

After the show

Sutherland played Joyce Summers from the first season of Buffy through Joyce’s death in season five’s “The Body” (2001), with later appearances in flashbacks and visions in seasons six and seven. Joss Whedon has said he cast her in part because she “exuded a warm demeanor” and resembled Sarah Michelle Gellar.

After Buffy she stepped back from full-time acting. She took a photography course at Santa Monica College and went on to set up a portrait studio. Her screen work since has been occasional: the miniseries Comanche Moon and a guest role on New Amsterdam (both 2008), four episodes of the soap One Life to Live (2010 to 2011), the film The Perfect Wedding (2012), an episode of The Following (2013), and Russian Doll (2016, not the later Netflix series). She is also among the voices of the local population in the 2013 video game Grand Theft Auto V.

In a 2019 interview she described working as both an actor and a photographer, documenting everyday life and interviews, and said she hoped to record the family histories of people she had known for some 20 years in order to “pass on their family history to the younger generation.” She called theatre her “first love.”

Lately

Sutherland has returned to talking about Buffy in long-form interviews. In November 2024 she was the guest on episode 293 of the Monsters, Madness and Magic podcast, covering her stage work, her training in London and her years on the show. She also sat for a multi-part conversation about Joyce with Juliet Landau (Drusilla) on Landau’s RE-VAMPED podcast.

In early 2026, around the 25th anniversary of “The Body,” she spoke to Us Weekly about the episode. She said Whedon asked her to keep the storyline to herself, and that “Knowing that I was going to die but not exactly when, it made the whole rest of [my time filming] so bittersweet.” Of filming the episode itself, she said, “It felt like somebody had died.”

Off screen

Sutherland is married to actor John Pankow, and the couple have a daughter.