I think the first thing I ever heard Michelle Trachtenberg say was, “Mom?!”
Being the younger sister who suddenly shows up on a popular TV show isn’t an easy role for any actor to step into, and Michelle Trachtenberg’s first appearance on Buffy the Vampire Slayer was more challenging than most. Fans were already warned that Buffy’s surprise younger sister Dawn was coming, and series creator Joss Whedon had promised there’d be an in-universe explanation for it all, but the backlash was still pretty harsh and unpleasant from some corners of fandom. Dawn (and by extension Trachtenberg) got a triple dose of criticism: she was a girl, she was a teenager, she was percieved as an intruder in a long-running show, heavily featured in a storyline that was certainly not one of the series’ strongest. Behind the scenes, Whedon’s behavior was so inappropriate that after a while the crew made sure he was never alone with her.
It was a big burden for a 15-year-old.
Trachtenberg handled it with more grace than most girls her age would have managed, but of course she was already no stranger to cult TV shows. Her first credited role was on the surreal Nickelodeon tween comedy The Adventures of Pete & Pete, but she’d been working as an actress since preschool. The daughter of German and Russian Jewish immigrants, she first attended school in Brooklyn but graduated from a high school in Sherman Oaks, no doubt due to her TV and film career. If you didn’t recognize her from Buffy, it might have been from the original Gossip Girl or the small part she had in the show’s ill-fated reprise, Six Feet Under, Euro Trip, or the Inspector Gadget or Harriet the Spy movies. Maybe it was the Discovery Kids show about urban legends, Truth or Scare. My favorite role of hers is in Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin, where she might be the only person Joseph Gordon-Leavitt’s damaged, charismatic hustler can really rely on. She did a little bit of voice work, a lot of guest roles, and a few music videos, including Fall Out Boy’s for “This Ain’t A Scene, It’s an Arms Race.” (You see what I mean about cult followings.)
Her roles had dropped off in recent years, probably due to her health issues. She was a producer of Tubi’s true crime show Meet, Marry, Murder, an echo of her old Truth or Scare days.
Even as a young actress, she always seemed to be unapologetically herself; the title from this article was taken from an interview that talked about some criticism she got for taking darker and more ambitious parts like her role in Mysterious Skin. As Dawn, she played a girl stuck in an impossible situation, having to question her own existence. She and Sarah Michelle Gellar played beautifully off one another, feeling like sisters, right until the series’ end.
I’m going to give the last word to her Gossip Girl co-star Blake Lively:
She was electricity. You knew when she entered a room because the vibration changed. Everything she did, she did 200%. She laughed the fullest at someone’s joke, she faced authority head on when she felt something was wrong, she cared deeply about her work, she was proud to be a part of this community and industry as painful as it could be sometimes, she was fiercely loyal to her friends and brave for those she loved, she was big and bold and distinctly herself.
God, this sucks. I forgot her role on Six Feet Under (due for a rewatch) but she’s really funny as Keith’s pop star boss, great mix of entitlement and ruthless intelligence. She got a lot of flack as Dawn*, in part because, well, she’s playing a whiny teenager, and whiny teenagers are sometimes annoying, which the show acknowledged out loud, and actors will by default have a hard time coming across as likeable in a culture that hates teenage girls, etc. But I could always see a lot of that intelligence in her expressions and choices on screen, especially in “The Body.” My grandpa died in 2020, and I had almost that same reaction (except over the phone) getting the news. RIP.
* Also fuck Whedon for whatever he did, miserable piece of shit.
Yeah, she’s incredible in “The Body.” She never got a full reconsideration the way I thought Vincent Karthesier did after Mad Men, but she seemed to have steady work and Gossip Girl probably paid the bills well for a while.
* yes.
A beautiful piece for someone taken far too soon.
Thank you.
She was just excellent as Dawn. Even in the seventh season where the focus was less on her character she had standout performances in Conversations With Dead People and Him. Also great in Eurotrip and her early Gossip Girls appearances, although they didn’t really know what to do with her character (or, frankly, anyone’s) later on.
She was incredible in Conversations with Dead People in particular.