When you ask Amber Benson about the decidedly gay turn her career has taken, she shrugs. “I have so many friends who are gay,” she says. “It’s just so normal to me, and it’s such a part of my life that it doesn’t seem like I’m doing anything special.” Her fans might disagree. A recent string of gay-themed projects — most notably, her role as doomed lesbian witch Tara on television’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer — has earned the 26-year-old actor-writer-director a large and loyal queer following.

So has her personality. Exuding a down-to-earth Southern charm, minus the accent (her father never let her say “Y’all” as a child), the Birmingham, Ala., native is known as one of the nicest and most unaffected people in Hollywood. This is, after all, a woman who once got down on all fours at a swank Tinseltown party to help a waitress clean up a spilled tray. But she shrugs that off, too. “I’m not trying to be nicer than other people. … I’m human and I’m fallible and I fuck up a lot,” she says.

Maybe. But there is no denying the girl has character. For instance, she signed on to her new film, Latter Days, not because she was offered a big part — she has a small if memorable role as a tough-talking waitress — but because she strongly believes gay and lesbian romances need a box-office boost. “I loved the script so much,” she says in a phone interview from her Los Angeles home. “I was like, ‘I’ll do anything to be in it!’” The movie, about a Los Angeles party boy who unexpectedly falls for a Mormon missionary, is the first produced by Funny Boy Films, which touts itself as the world’s first gay and lesbian film studio. “You don’t get many romantic comedies about two gay men or two women. There’s a whole segment of the population that is not getting its needs addressed, and I felt this film was trying to address them. Plus,” she adds, “it has a happy ending.”

Participating in a project with a happy ending is a significant event for Benson, given the gruesome and controversial end her character met on Buffy last year. “When she was killed like that, it really fucked some shit up,” she says.

For nearly three years, Benson played shy, kindhearted Tara to Alyson Hannigan’s adorably geeky Willow on Buffy. The couple’s romance was a favorite with both fans and critics, hailed for being the longest-running lesbian relationship in television history. But when Tara was shot through the heart moments after makeup sex with Willow, it sparked the biggest backlash in the show’s history. What Buffy creator Joss Whedon thought would play as a heartbreaking lover’s tragedy instead played like a lost clip from The Celluloid Closet. Outraged viewers sent thousands of protest letters to the show and lit up the Web with fierce debates about Hollywood’s treatment of gay characters.

“You had people who posted on the Internet saying, ‘Thank God, Tara’s dead!’” Benson recalls, “but then this plethora of people going, ‘Oh. My. God. I’m never watching that show again!’” (Apparently, they meant it. Buffy’s ratings dropped an average of 15 percent following Tara’s demise. “Really?” Benson responds in surprise when I mention it.)

Whedon eventually washed his hands of the controversy by claiming he “didn’t care” about social issues, but it wasn’t so simple for Benson. “[Joss] wasn’t Tara,” she explains. “He didn’t walk in her shoes.”

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