From her role as an unconventional flautist in American Pie to that of a lesbian witch on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, actress Alyson Hannigan has delighted in turning audience expectations on their heads. Hannigan began acting in commercials at age four and landed her first major film role in My Stepmother is an Alien in 1988. She took time out to earn a degree in psychology from the University of California, Northridge before being cast as Willow Rosenberg on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1997, playing a Jewish character who eventually comes out as a lesbian. That plot development caused a media firestorm in 1998, just one year after Ellen Degeneres came out as a lesbian both in real life and through her sitcom character. Hannigan then landed a central role in the American Pie trilogy. In 2005 she began playing Lily Aldrin on the wildly popular How I Met Your Mother, which ran from 2005–2014, and for which she won the People’s Choice Award for Best Actress in 2010 and 2012.