Head of the Class, April 1999 (#248), by Richard Moore.

It's two years since Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) wandered into the library at Sunnydale High School, to be greeted by a bespectacled Englishman who announced, "I'm Mr. Giles. I was told you were coming."

Looking back to those early episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it's hard to believe how much the show has changed. The humour is there, as is the horror, but the lightweight banter is now complemented by raw emotion and darker themes. We've seen how the union of Buffy and Angel (David Boreanaz) ended in tragedy, as the vampire regained his soul and began a reign on terror as Angelus. We've seen Angel's "death" at Buffy's hands, her attempts to cope with the loss, and his eventual return from Hell. And we've seen how the threat of Buffy's undead boyfriend has strained her relationship with Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), who in turn almost causes The Chosen One's death while obeying a ritual for the Council of Watchers. It's all engrossing stuff, which has made Buffy the fastest growing cult TV hit of recent years--a fact Anthony Stewart Head ascribes to the creative genius of executive producer Joss Whedon.

"We're going to the darker recesses of Joss's mind," Head says of the third season. "It's where he'd like it to go. The humour is still there, but I think Joss is just letting it go a bit. It's the areas that we could always have gone, but we've just been a little reserved and held it back. As the show gets more under its belt, it gets a little bit more grown up, a little bit more edgy.

"I think he really knows his audience very well, and he knows how to make the show work for the audience and make the show work for himself. I think where we're going now is where he's always wanted to be, it's just we've taken a little time to get there."

This year, the darker tone is complemented by some new production techniques, including the move onto more expensive 35 millimetre film, which gives the show an added gloss.

"This season seems to be getting more and more filmic," Head notes. "Now we've gone to 35 mill the scope of the show seems to be getting broader. We're getting closer to doing little movies. I don't know whether it's more dramatic, we've had our share of funny episodes."

If it's Whedon's humour that draws you to Buffy, you need to look no further than this year's "Band Candy," in which chemically enhanced chocolate bars cause Sunnydale's adult population to regress to their teenage years. For Giles, it's a leap indeed, as the normally sober, diligent librarian becomes a rowdy hooligan who dates Buffy's mom (Kristine Sutherland).

"'Band Candy'" was such fun to do," Head enthuses. "It was phenomenal, and I thought Kristine was a blast, and Armin [Shimerman, who plays Principal Snyder] was great too. It was really such fun to see people letting it go.

"It was very scary for an actor to do because I didn't want to overdo it. I wanted to do it right. Playing a teen, you can do it really wrong. I was playing myself, I was playing an English kid. That's very different. We were trying to work out what I could wear that would be in my wardrobe, not that I would go out and buy it, because that didn't figure in the scenario. People kept coming back to James Dean, and I was saying that was the Fifties. My teens were in the late Sixties, early Seventies, very different. I think what we came up with worked. It was very interesting to work out."

The relationship between Giles and Mrs. Summers in that episode soon flared the fans' imaginations, and the Internet buzzed with talk of the two characters getting together. Since then, there has been the occasional awkward moment of recognition between the pair, most notably in the hilarious "Gingerbread," but the relationship remains in the subtext. Which is where Head believes it will remain...

"Joss will do anything but the obvious," Head insists, "and once it had appeared on the Net as being a possible...never again! Besides which it would put an untenable strain on my relationship with Buffy."

So far in the series, Giles has not been lucky in love. His quite charming and romantic relationship with Jenny Calendar (Robia La Morte) was cut short by Angelus, and that tragedy continues to reverberate throughout the series. Looking back to Season Two's "Passion," in which the vampire closed in on Jenny, chased her through the High School, then broke her neck, Head admits that when he first read the script, he cried.

"When I read that I couldn't believe it," he admits. "Most especially, the scene that made me cry, and it was written by Ty King and directed by Michael Gershwin, was there I'm on the phone and it's shot in silence. It was written that you see [Buffy and Willow] react to my telling them that she's dead on the phone, and it's a beautiful scene."

It may have been the end for Jenny, but Robia La Morte has since made a couple of guest appearances in the show. In the second season's finale "The Becoming," Giles was abducted and tortured by Angelus, who was in league with Spike and Drusilla. Attempting to obtain the Librarian's knowledge of a demon that can transport the world into Hell, Drusilla forces him to accept her as his deceased love.

"That was very sexy," recalls the actor. "The only thing that was difficult about it was when I was being tortured I wanted something that would give me immediate discomfort. I went to the lady who was doing hair at the time, who had been a nurse, and said, 'Is there anything that can give me a little bit of pain that's not going to be life threatening, that isn't going to break the skin?'

"She said, 'What about chewing a pepper?' It was a brilliant idea! So I went through this bag of peppers, and it works on camera. It didn't give me the immediacy that I wanted, but what did happen was that my lips went completely numb--I had pepper all over them. All I could think of was that the next scene was going to be kissing Robia and Juliet Landau, and so I rushed off to my trailer to scrub it off!"

Robia La Morte reprised the role again in a larger capacity in this year's "Amends," the Christmas episode in which Angel is haunted by the souls of all the people he has killed. As "Jenny" attempts to drive Angel to kill Buffy, the vampire decides he would sooner end his own life instead.

"It was very strange because she was actually interacting with Angel," offers Head. "Everything we'd always done, we'd always interacted together. She was part of his story, and he was seeing her, so our relationship wasn't there. I love working with her, and we had a really good relationship, so it was very strange because I couldn't play her being there at all. Watching the episode, and all the scenes that she did with David... It was like 'She's my girlfriend! Stay away from her--you've got your own!'"

As if Giles' luck could not get any worse, recently the Watcher was relieved of his duties, after Buffy's rite of passage went hideously wrong in "Helpless." Drugged by the librarian, The Chosen One found herself bereft of her powers--as an insane vampire went on the loose, kidnapping Buffy's mother. Disobeying the Council of Watchers, Giles revealed the truth to Buffy--and faced the consequences.

While only Joss Whedon is aware of how this story arc will develop, one cannot help wondering if he is paving the way for the show's fourth season, when Buffy and her friends will leave Sunnydale High School, and move on to college.

"It doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to leave," insists Head, "but there are interesting things going down which might affect the way that I play it, it might affect my relationship with her, it might affect what happens. It is very threatening to Giles; we've talked about whether he remains attached to the college, or whether he is a free agent--maybe he works from his home. I dunno.

"It's good stuff and it made me thing... The next episode ["The Zeppo"] didn't refer to it, and I said, 'There has to be a scene between me and Buffy, something's got to be said.' He went, 'OK, but I can't see where it is.' He came back and said, 'There's something there, and also it might be interesting if your appearance changes accordingly.' Now I'm going to sit down and have a chat with him and see if there's a knock on effect."

Did Whedon make Head aware that Giles was due to meet his downfall in "Helpless?"

"He tells you what you need to know to play it," reveals the actor. "I agree with him, and I'm a great believer, if I have precognition of what's going to happen I'll start to play it. Whereas in life, when something's thrown at you you deal with it. So if he throws something at me that is life-changing, then it's more interesting to deal with it on the spot and find out how I feel about it than to know it's coming."

An exception to this case was Season Two's "The Dark Age," in which Buffy and the audience discovers that Giles has a dark past, in which he helped summon a powerful demon.

"He let me know that I have a dark past quite early on," reveals Head. "In those respects, if there's back story he'll provide it, or make me aware something's coming. In terms of future developments, I don't want to know."

While Head's home and family are in Britain, he spends much of the year living in Los Angeles, where Buffy is filmed. His last trip home was at Christmas, when he was able to catch the BBC2 premiere of the show's pilot, "Welcome to the Hellmouth."

"I couldn't believe how much I'd changed," he laughs. "Firstly that he's started to relax with Buffy. Then the introduction of Jenny changes him, then Jenny's death changes him, then the torture changed him, then stuff that has gone down this season has changed him... Pivotal moments like "The Dark Age" when we find out about his past, and the talk that he has with Buffy when he actually admits what he's done.

"It's a huge change for the character and I've been able to use each one of those moments and knock the character for six and put a different slew on him. If you lose someone you love like that, and so viciously, you become a different person. It makes him interesting to play."

When Buffy returns for its fourth season in the Fall, Whedon will have altered the mix once again. David Boreanaz will be starring in the spin-off series Angel, alongside Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia. The parting of The Chosen One and her true love will certainly provide plenty of possibilities for emotional farewells--but can the series survive the departure of two of its long-serving stars?

"Joss has always said it was not his intention for [the Buffy/Angel relationship] to become all consuming," Head maintains. "As he has introduced new characters, he has known exactly what he was doing. The introduction of Oz was a stroke of genius; the introduction of Spike and Drusilla was mind-blowing. When he first told me, 'I've got a great couple of bad guys and they're called Spike and Drusilla,' I went 'Yeah!'

"He has a great overview and I don't think it will change the show per se."

Page created May 1999. Original material © Betsy Vera (bentley@umich.edu). This website is for information and entertainment purposes only and is not intended to infringe on copyrights held by others.

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