For Joyce Summers, a constant source of mother-daughter tension revolves around Buffy slipping out each evening and risking her life battling vampires. But for Kristin Sutherland, the actress who portrays her, most major childhood battle involved a far more harmless pursuit: piano lessons.

“It was the biggest bone of contention between my mother and I growing up,” recalls Sutherland. “It symbolized everything that I thought was wrong with our relationship. I was finally allowed to quit when my brother and I were caught lying about whether we had practiced.”

Joyce can take some solace in the fact that Sutherland has once again taken up the piano, and today loves to play. So maybe there’s hope for Buffy and her long-suffering mother.

Regardless, Sutherland’s conflicts with her mom over the piano are just one example of the experiences she draws upon in creating her performance. “My other was a single mother, and struggled with a lot of those same issues that I struggle with as Joyce,” says Sutherland. “For the sense of deep love and connection—that fierce passion you feel for your child—I draw on my feelings for my own daughter. In terms of trying to parent an adolescent, I try to go back to my adolescence and my relationship with my mother. I try and figure out those struggles, and try to get into that from her point of view.”

Fortunately for Sutherland’s sizable acting chops, Joyce’s point-of-view has been changing on virtually a weekly basis.

Learning about her daughter’s dangerous little secret at the end of last season, Joyce was left dealing with some complex new internal conflicts, resulting in a few haphazard emotional explosions. One week, she’s afraid to let Buffy drive: the next, she’s an accomplice to breaking and entering. You can almost hear the wheels spin in Sutherland’s head as her character rewrites the parenting handbook from page one.

“Now that I know she’s a vampire slayer, there’s so much to process. Coming to terms with that,” she says, “I think Joyce is struggling to find her place in Buffy’s life. There was a comfort level in the second season, that whatever Buffy was doing, she was on the right track. Finding out that she’s a vampire slayer just threw things right open, so I think I’m really struggling this season to find out what in her life I can share, and how to manage my sense of fear for her.”

Forget about the extreme complications of parenting a Slayer, just parenting that most peculiar of beasts—the teenager—presents enough problems of its own. This has led to some interesting discoveries on Sutherland’s part, as she adapts to her onscreen daughter’s dalliances with both supernatural demons and the more typical demons that prey upon teenage girls: boys.

“One of the most powerful scenes for me emotionally, where I was so able to plug in to the given circumstances, was in the first season,” recalls Sutherland. “Angel’s over and I come into the hallway at night and I sense something’s up because Buffy’s acting a little strange. Then Angel steps in, and suddenly I’m confronted with this really handsome young man [who] definitely has a sexual interest in your daughter. I realized in that situation, something I had never realized before, which is that even though you’re the mother and even though you’re older, you’re capable of thinking that the guy’s attractive too. That completely took me by surprise.”

Whether or not fans should keep their eyes open for sparks between Buffy’s mom and her boyfriend, Sutherland does find her work is often based in an identification with her on-screen daughter, as well as a sympathy for the mom’s perspective. This often means tempering an awareness for teenage rebellion with a parent’s ability to strategically look the other way.

“It’s funny, become sometimes people said to me before I knew she was a slayer, ‘How could you possibly not know she’s a vampire slayer?’” comments Sutherland. “I started to laugh, because at that time in my life—sophomore, junior year in high school—I did all kinds of things my mother had no idea I was doing. It didn’t seem strange at all to me that she didn’t know, because I think there’s a healthy amount of denial at a certain point. That’s important to have as a parent.”

But with Buffy’s big revelation, Sutherland’s on-screen alter ego can no longer hide behind the mask of parental denial. Now she’s forced to confront the dark evils of the supernatural along with her daughter. At the same time, she has to reconcile her appreciation for Buffy’s superhuman abilities with her natural concern for her daughter’s well-being.

“It’s strange that your daughter is so different from you, that she’s this thing that you really don’t understand and in many ways is so powerful, yet is still a kid,” says Sutherland. “Joyce still has to figure out when to look out for her, when she needs it and when she doesn’t need it.”

As a teen, Sutherland took the kind of risks that probably frightened her own parents somewhat, setting aside aspirations to teach English in the hopes of making it as an actress. She first took an interest in the stage during high school when a friend’s reluctance to try out for the school musical inspired her to audition and provide moral support. From that point, she embraced performing as her one true love. After studying theater at the University of Kentucky and in London, Sutherland found success on the stage in New York, which led to a few television commercials.

“Theater was my first love, absolutely,” says Sutherland. “I never watched movies growing up, so I didn’t even have a history of movies. I was pretty much doing theater through my twenties, and started doing a couple of commercials and realized how much I loved being in front of the cameras. I switched my focus at that point. I spent a lot of years auditioning and doing pilots.”

It’s unlikely that appearing in a series of half-hour T.V. pilots could have prepared her for doing the emotional pace of her work on Buffy. Every week provides a new bundle of surprises from Joss Whedon and the writing staff, and the actors are often as eager as the show’s viewers to find out what’s going to happen to the characters.

“I’m such a big fan of the show; I really anticipate getting each script and seeing where it’s going to go,” says Sutherland. “When I read part 2 of ‘Becoming’, I grabbed it off the front porch and I had an appointment early in the morning. I drove to Hollywood, and I’m pulling over to the side of the road—I had to peek. I’m sitting there on the side of the road, reading the script, and when it gets to the part where Angel gets sucked into hell, I’m devastated—I’m just completely devastated. I can even watch an episode that I’m in, and know exactly who’s behind the camera and who’s checking the focus, and I don’t see any of that. I totally get into the scene.”

Best of all, portraying Buffy’s mom gives Sutherland plenty of time to practice her parenting technique while preparing for her own adolescent in the house, with non of the ugly emotional traumas that could arise from having to learn as she goes.

“My daughter is much younger [than Buffy],” she says. “It’s been a very interesting exercise for me, like I get a dress rehearsal for the future. She just turned eight, and she’s starting to change and get some of that pre-teen behavior going. Her life is starting to break away from just being mom and dad at the center of the universe. It’s interesting emotionally, because [the show] is a journey I’m going to be taking myself as a mother. It’s just really fascinating to explore.”