Here's the interview. Nothing major spoiler-wise, if you've seen S3 of 'Angel' up to 'Waiting in the Wings':
Half Price
Starting out as Giles’s replacement in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, Wesley Wyndam-Price now watches the streets of LA in ‘Angel’. Paul Spragg gets up close and personal to co-star Alexis Denisof...
Way back in season three of ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’, there began the reign of terror of Giles's replacement as Watcher: Wesley Wyndam-Price. Well, okay, so it was more a reign of uselessness and running away, but let's not get bogged down in technicalities. The person flawlessly portraying the pompous Englishness is actually Canadian [my note: HE’S AMERICAN, YOU IDIOTS!] actor Alexis Denisof. After a spending a little while getting used to his actual voice (his English accent is near-flawless), it seemed a good idea to begin at the beginning.
“I had been over in LA on a holiday with some mates, had just broken up with my girlfriend, and had lucked into a couple of auditions, one of which led to doing a pilot series for Fox”, explains Denisof. “We shot that in Canada and it didn’t end up being picked up. And then I landed another job which shot in Australia, an NBC mini-series, ‘Noah’s Ark’. On the way back to London [where he lived at the time], I stopped off in LA to see my agents over here and check in with them and they said, “Oh well, before you take off, an audition came in for a couple of episodes of ‘Buffy’, which was a show I’d never heard of before, because it hadn’t begun in England by then.
“So I said, ‘Well, that’s a funny-sounding old name, what kind of show’s that?’, so they told me a little bit about it. I had bumped into my friend Tony Head [Giles in ‘Buffy’], who had said ‘Oh, there’s this part you might be very good for, if you’re interested.’, so I thought ‘Well, I’ll stick around and meet them’, and went in and met Joss [Whedon], read for the part and just hit it off with him right away.
“We saw something very funny and peculiar in the role of Wesley that we both liked and so they wrote him in for a couple of shows and the intention at that point was to kill him off; this was about halfway through season three. Meanwhile, I’m still trying to get back to London, you know, get another couple of shirts and wash up the mouldy cup of tea that’s been sitting on the sideboard for by now six or eight months,” he laughs.
Of course, Wesley survived the season, but, sacked by the Watchers’ Council for his poor handling of the Faith situation, disappeared for a while. The next time he appeared was in LA, when he went unsubtly seeking gainful employment at Angel Investigations as a rogue demon hunter. Denisof had a new problem to face, however. He was joining spin-off show ‘Angel’ one episode after the death of Doyle, a character that had become popular quickly with fans. Was this a tough act to follow?
"Yeah, there was definitely a mixed response," considers the actor. "I consider that a challenge, to be perfectly honest. I was delighted because I knew what Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt [co-creators of ‘Angel’] had in store for Wesley. I knew they were going to take a good long time and really evolve the character, I knew the ideas that I had that I wanted to bring in, and then to do that in the face of adversity just makes it all the more tasty.
"It's nice to surprise people and to show them that a book isn't necessarily its cover, and that's what I think Wesley is all about. He has hidden depths and complexities that have been discovered consistently throughout the years of the show. And each season it just gets better and better, I think, for that character."
“I felt like there was an attitude that Wesley’s replacing Doyle, and I think that’s sort of a misnomer because it just happens to coincide that Doyle’s death is shortly before Wesley’s arrival. It was always in the works that Wesley would join the gang from a very early conception of the show. And I just found that also, as a character dynamic, the Doyle character was a little darker than what they needed at the time, and that caused a problem. You sort of had a big Angel and then a little Angel in the form of Doyle, and it became more useful for the writing to have somebody very different, and that somebody was Wesley.”
In the beginning, however, Wesley was very different character to the one we see today. In the third season of ‘Buffy’, not to mention for his first few episodes of ‘Angel’, Wesley was present mainly to foul things up, fall over and generally act as the comic relief. Things changed dramatically towards the end of ‘Angel’ season one when rogue slayer Faith reappeared with some old scores to settle. (“Oh yeah, she kicked the shit out of him, didn’t she?,” recalls Denisof.) These scenes not only made Wesley more likeable, gaining audience sympathy through the Slayer’s vicious torturing of him, but also showed that within him, Wesley really did have courage and toughness to spare. Denisof explains that he didn't have to push to have Wesley toughened up.
"That was really what Joss and David wanted to move towards anyway. I mean, once he was taken out of Sunnydale and was gonna be added to ‘Angel’ as a regular, we all knew that we had to refit the character so it could be somebody people would want to be with on a regular basis. Prior to that, the idea of him was to turn up and either be funny, be annoying or advance the plot and then go away.
"But now the responsibility's different. Making him tougher was inevitable because he would have to be tougher to survive in the world in which they live. And also, the guy that goes off and studies with the Council of Watchers to work with a vampire slayer must have some grain of toughness in him, if that's his ambition for himself. It's been a real pleasure to reveal the unique toughness that Wesley has.
And it isn’t as if he’s a superhero. I’m anxious to point out that it’s important that Wesley remains human and Cordelia remains human because we have to provide a human fabric from which Angel becomes the superhero. He’s the one with all the after-market specials that we didn’t have as human beings. When we get shot, it hurts. When we get hit, it bleeds and we have a nasty bruise and it takes a few days for it to go away. I try to keep that as part of him as well. I don’t like those shows where human beings get the crap beaten out of them and just jump up and shake it off.”
Over the last year, we’ve seen a new side to the character once again as Wes has become the boss at Angel Investigations. “I think that was a good angle for the character”, Denisof says of his promotion. “It kind of made sense, kind of decompartmentalizing, so that it’s still a democracy and we can all still overlap and do the jobs [other] people are doing, but we have other departments now, and I think that makes sense for the business as much as for the character. It’s a very practical solution, and I like the way they handled it, that it was a test of confidence and that it wasn’t an easy step to take.”
So far this season, events have centred more around Angel, Darla, baby Connor and further expansion of Cordelia’s character. However, one hour in particular brought an opportunity and an impressive performance from Denisof: ‘Billy’. The tale sees Wesley affected by uncontrollable violent rage towards women being spread by a young man called Billy, setting out on a psychotic rampage and chasing Fred (Amy Acker) around the base of Angel Investigations. It’s mentioned that this horrific and nasty side to the character wouldn’t have worked until now.
“No, absolutely not,” agrees Denisof. “I don’t think it would have been possible a couple of seasons ago. You could write that show, but you couldn’t have that happen to Wesley. It wasn’t there, it wasn’t in the character.
“It had a lot of good stuff in it, didn’t it?”, he continues. “It’s just a terrific story. [Writers] Tim [Minear] and Jeffrey [Bell] really wrote a cracking script for that and we just went for it, no holding back.”
At one point, Wesley bursts through a door with an ax in true Jack Nicholson/‘The Shining’ style. Despite screaming out for it, you never hear the words ‘Here’s Wesley!’, however. Denisof laughs at the observation. “There was the opportunity but I resisted it. It was never in the script but clearly there is a parallel, but that was already so evident that I thought it was more tantalizing to just have you thinking, “Oh, he might as well just say that”, rather than actually doing it.
“I’m proud of that show for everybody: the writing, the directing and the performances. Every department on every level seemed to hit their stride with that show. I think it’s something we’re all really happy with. Joss says ‘This is the tape I give to people to show them ‘Angel’, and it’s really exciting that we’re hitting that form now. This season is really going to a great level.”
Speaking of which, it’s time to make the usual futile attempts to get spoilers out of one of the stars. “I would so love to tell you about the show we’re starting next week [‘Waiting in the Wings’], but it really be letting the cat out of the bag,” says Denisof apologetically. “It’s a Joss episode, which means it’s, of course, beautifully written and it will be beautifully directed and we’re all really excited to be back with our ‘big father’. I hesitate to say anything about it because there are so many good things in this, and fans are just gonna flip when they see it. It has a lot of surprises.”
Evidently this is all we’re going to get. Just time, then, to ask Denisof about the special lady in his life, girlfriend Alyson Hannigan, known to the world as Willow in ‘Buffy’. Does she get spotted more since being in her company? “Yes. We do when we’re together, but I think she would anyway. I get very friendly recognition. People are very nice. They always have something really nice to say about the show or my contribution to the show, so if somebody’s paying a compliment I never mind being stopped. It does happen, although I do think Wesley is not the sort of person you expect to see wandering down Santa Monica Boulevard, so there’s a lot of double takes: ‘Is that...? No.... Oh my goodness!’ But by and large people have been very nice to me when they do take the time to stop and say hello.”
And what about movie premieres? Is it a case of ‘Excuse me, can you get out of the way so we can speak to Alyson?’ Denisof laughs again. “When we’re going down the red carpet, there’s lots of ‘Oh, look, can we get a shot of you two?’ and ‘Look this way, look this way, look this way’, and then after a couple of minutes of that it’s usually, ‘Thanks Alexis, can we just get a shot of Alyson now?’ But I’m delighted to have that be the case. She’s beautiful and I want there to be as many pictures as people want to take of her, so I never mind stepping aside and letting her bathe in the limelight. She deserves it.” Ah, the old smoothie. Looks like that British chivalry is rubbing off...
[This message has been edited by tyche (edited February 12, 2002).]
[This message has been edited by tyche (edited February 12, 2002).]