Seth Green Recalls the Time He Went Shirtless on Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Seth Green wasn’t exactly surprised when Buffy the Vampire Slayer asked him to take his shirt off.

The actor, who played fan-favorite werewolf Oz on the hit supernatural series, recently looked back on the experience during an appearance on the How To Make It With Emily Cappello podcast.

Green joked that shirtless scenes were almost expected on teen shows in the late 1990s.

“That kind of show, especially when you get cast in like romance stuff,” Green said. “I’d already seen half the people on that show without their clothes on.”

He was referring to The WB, the network behind Buffy and several other popular teen dramas at the time.

Green joined Buffy during its second season in 1997, appearing alongside Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan and Nicholas Brendon. He played Oz, a quiet guitarist who discovers that he is a werewolf and eventually becomes Willow’s boyfriend.

By the time Green joined the series, he was already an experienced actor. He had started working as a child and had appeared in shows including The Facts of Life, Mr. Belvedere, The Wonder Years and Beverly Hills, 90210.

So when it was time to go shirtless on Buffy, Green decided to take the job seriously.

“I had come from a generation that watched both Luke Perry and Jason Priestley topless in almost every episode of Beverly Hills, 90210,” he recalled. “I was like, all right, I’m going to do a bunch of sit-ups.”

Green also remembered receiving some unexpected advice from another actor, who suggested he use contouring to improve his appearance on camera.

But Green wasn’t convinced.

“I’m so pale,” he joked. “I think any airbrushing would look like tattoos. So I’m just going to raw dog this and let’s see where we get.”

The comments offer a humorous glimpse into the expectations actors faced on The WB, a network famous for shows aimed at younger audiences. Along with Buffy, its lineup included Dawson’s Creek, Felicity, Popular and One Tree Hill.

The network was also frequently criticized for having actors play teenagers while presenting them in increasingly adult and sexualized situations.

Green left Buffy in 2000 but went on to build a wide-ranging career in film and television. His credits include the Austin Powers movies, Can’t Hardly Wait, The Italian Job, Family Guy and Robot Chicken.

More than two decades later, his memories of Buffy remain a reminder of just how different the teen-TV landscape was in the late 1990s.