“If it wasn’t for Luke Perry, Buffy the Vampire Slayer would’ve never happened,” says Fran Rubel Kuzui, the director of the 1992 movie, speaking via Zoom from her home in Tokyo where she’s lived full-time since 2000. For a myriad of reasons, she stopped giving interviews a long time ago about Buffy, but today, she’s breaking her silence. She wants everyone to know Luke’s special connection to the beloved vampire franchise.

In 1991, Kuzui was searching for a new project. Her 1988 film, Tokyo Pop, starring Carrie Hamilton as a bleached-blond punk singer on a tour of 1980s Japan, garnered strong reviews, but not enough to inure her from the prejudices of Hollywood. She’d just been fired from her second picture for, in her words, being a female director. No one could blame her for already being in the mood for blood when Howard Rosenman of Sandollar Productions, founded by Dolly Parton and her former manager Sandy Gallin, passed her a script titled Buffy the Vampire Slayer, written by twenty-seven-year-old newcomer Joss Whedon. Secretly, she was sold on the title alone, but she dutifully blazed through it over a weekend; by Monday, she sent Rosenman a garlic pizza. She secured the option, thinking she’d make a quirky indie movie. Rewrites with Whedon commenced.

Every major studio rejected Buffy in its first iteration, but in its new sharpened form, Twentieth Century Fox expressed interest. Shortly thereafter—and Kuzui admits she can’t remember exactly how it happened—Luke read the script and wanted in. He had recently signed a two-movie deal with the studio. FOX was encouraged; if Luke attached himself, the movie could be a runaway success, but it would only work if the director thought the young star was appropriate for the role of Pike, a wrong-side-of-the-tracks type who, after initially bickering with Buffy, becomes her love interest. Kuzui invited Luke to a meeting at the Mondrian Hotel.

Kuzui hadn’t yet seen 90210, but she found herself intimidated by the level of fuss surrounding Luke. A few minutes before she was to meet him on the patio, she popped into the hotel’s gift shop for a pack of mints, only to find his face staring her down from the cover of People magazine. But her nerves vanished once she sat down with him on the patio.

“It was like meeting with an old friend,” she says. “We just sat and talked and talked. There was never any doubt that I wanted to work with him. He was very enthusiastic and supportive.”

After a table read, weeks before the shooting began in spring 1992, Luke came up to Kuzui with a concern. “Have you thought about what you’re going to wear on set?”

“No, should I be thinking about this?” As a New Yorker well into her forties, she had her look figured out—artsy but classic, and lots of black. Luke paused. “Well, there have been a few women directors on the show,” he said, referring to 90210. “And I noticed they all had stylists.” “A stylist? For me to direct a movie?”

“Oh, well, maybe you don’t need it.” He took in her Armani suit, seemingly for the first time. “Okay, this is going to work,” he said. Looking back, Kuzui says, “It was so cute for this twenty-four-year-old kid to be concerned about me in this way. I had been trying to be supportive of him, and he wanted to give something back, but he didn’t know what else to offer me.”

However naively, Luke was remarking on a very real culture at the time. Female directors were under such pressure to prove their worth to a sexist industry that acquiring a stylist for in-person polish probably seemed like a small price to pay. In the early nineties, Kuzui barely had any peers. In the big studio system, there was Amy Heckerling, Penny Marshall, and Kathryn Bigelow. Many of the crew on the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer had never worked with a female director. Yet here she was, making a movie about female empowerment, a statement at stark odds with Hollywood’s reality.

Deep into Buffy’s six-week shoot at a Santa Monica warehouse, Kuzui walked off the set, frustrated by “unprofessional and unkind” behaviors within her crew. After about fifteen minutes, Luke came to where she had secluded herself.

He sat next to her. “Everybody feels really bad,” he said.

“Well, they should,” Kuzui answered.

“I know. And I want to apologize for it.”

Kuzui looked at him. “If I were a man,” she asked, “would this have happened?” “No.”

They contemplated in silence for a moment. Then he asked, “Will you come back to set with me?”

“Sure,” she said. “As long as everyone understands that that’s not acceptable anymore.”

They stood up, and just as Kuzui was about to walk back on her own, Luke surprised her with a big gesture. He swept her off her feet and carried her, damsel-in-distress style. “He wasn’t a big guy,” Kuzui remembers, laughing, “but I’m pretty small, too.” He walked all the way back to set, and then gently placed her right next to the camera.

Luke wasn’t responsible for the bad energy that forced Kuzui to take a stand that day, but as a young star on the rise, he possessed the power to shift it. His carrying stunt might’ve completely rankled someone else, but Kuzui viewed it as supportive and campy, in the spirit of the film itself. And the bottom line was, they trusted each other.

Luke wasn’t blind to the feminist import of Buffy. In interviews, Luke frequently referred to his character Pike as the “damsel in distress,” for getting rescued by Buffy and for being far outpaced by her supernatural fighting skills. Of all the cast members, “Luke and Paul Reubens were the ones who got it the most,” Kuzui says. She also credits David Arquette, who Luke folded into the project (he also recommended Kristy Swanson as the heroine; she and Luke were dating around that time). For camaraderie, Kuzui frequently relied on Reubens, who plays a vampire in his first big role post–Pee-wee Herman, and Arquette, who played Pike’s friend-turned-vampire, but she called Luke the “great advocate for the film.” He understood that playing a man in awe of a woman’s strength was both the fun of the movie and its fanged bite at Hollywood’s usual fare.

Luke was “always 100 percent present for me,” Kuzui maintains, but it was clear “he was being torn in several directions.” There was no downtime for him between takes; he was always signing stacks of photos, or being interviewed on the phone, or meeting with Cyd LeVin, his manager. LeVin believed in Luke, and wanted to capitalize on his momentum, which meant keeping him busy. Sometimes he showed up for one of Buffy’s many night shoots looking so drained that Kuzui had to ask, “Are you okay?” He downplayed her concerns.

His profile was so high at the time that the production was forced to hide his identity. After three hundred screaming girls showed up at one of their location shoots, an alias was created for Luke on the call sheet. He became Chet. Not to be outdone, Reubens became Beau Hunkus.

Occasionally, Luke got to cut loose in the way that Reubens and Arquette often did during their slow moments. Kuzui recalls one of those occasions.

“Look, I’m a doll,” Luke said, wiggling his miniature replica at Kuzui and Reubens. Beverly Hills, 90210 had just released the Mattel doll versions of several of the show characters, including Dylan McKay. Dressed in a red jacket, black T-shirt, and faded jeans (he also came equipped with “beach wear,” a pair of black board shorts), his doppelgänger was ridiculously tan by human or plastic standards.

The back of the box copy read: “Dylan McKay is not only handsome but also serious and intelligent. Rebellious on the outside and troubled on the inside, he shuns his family’s mega-wealthy status. He and Brenda are the hottest couple at West Beverly Hills High. Friends are Brandon Walsh, Kelly Taylor and Donna Martin.”

Then, in smaller type, the words that accompanied so many toy commercials of the era: “Each sold separately. Collect them all.”

Reubens, no stranger to life as a caricature, was inspired. “Ooh, I’m a doll too!” He returned with Pee-wee Herman by Matchbox, natty in his gray suit and red bow tie. Perry, Reubens, and Kuzui took to the floor and played with the dolls. Luke’s stood at a diminutive 11.5 inches, compared to Pee-wee’s towering 17. Mattel had gotten the forehead wrinkles right, but Dylan’s lips were strangely pursed, as if he’d just bitten into a bad clam. Still, could the two dolls be friends? Could Dylan teach Pee-wee to surf? Could Pee-wee show Dylan how to dance? For that moment, a broken rich boy and a cackling man-child ruled the world.

Adapted from A Good Bad Boy: Luke Perry and How A Generation Grew Up by Margaret Wappler. Copyright © 2024 by Margaret Wappler. To be published by Simon & Schuster.