Jesse McNally

Jesse McNally was a fictional character on the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He was a major character in the series premiere (broken into two episodes in reruns) and was played by Eric Balfour.

Jesse McNally was a student of Sunnydale High and a close friend of both Willow Rosenberg and Xander Harris at the time that Buffy Summers transferred to Sunnydale High from Hemery High. He also had a crush on Cordelia Chase.

Jesse possessed the common powers and weaknesses of vampires in the Buffyverse. He also showed the typical attitude of newly-sired vampires, astonished by his newfound powers and immortality.

Quotes
(Trying to get Buffy to talk about herself) "If you have any dark, painful secrets you'd like us to publish?" ("Welcome to the Hellmouth")

(After beinging turned into a vampire) "I feel good, Xander! I feel strong! I'm connected, man, to everything! I, I can hear the worms in the earth! . . . You're like a shadow to me now." ("The Harvest")

(To Cordelia) "Shut up!" ("The Harvest")

(To Xander) "Okay... Let's deal with this. Jesse was an excruciating loser who couldn't get a date with anyone in the sighted community! Look at me. I'm a new man!" ("The Harvest". In the DVD commentary, Joss Whedon expresses remorse for making him say excruciating loser through prosthetic vampire teeth.)

Character trivia
It is rumored that Joss Whedon planned for Jesse to return as an "avatar" or shape of the First Evil for the seventh-season episode "Conversations with Dead People" to provide a dead person for Xander to talk to, but when Eric Balfour was unavailable, the Xander act was scratched. This led to Xander not appearing in the episode at all, his only non-appearance throughout the series.

Joss Whedon planned to include Balfour in the opening credit sequence of the pilot, to make it even more shocking when this supposed main character was immediately killed off. There was not enough money to do this at the time, but Whedon later used the trick in the sixth season, putting Amber Benson in the credits for the first time in the episode where her character Tara was killed.