Alexis Denisof

Philip Key talks to Alexis Denisof about the theatre and watching Buffy

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel stars, Alyson Hannigan and Alexis Denisof

FOR an American actor, Alexis Denisof plays a pretty good Englishman. It was as an Englishman that he spent six years in two of television’s biggest cult successes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

He was Wesley Wyndham-Price, one of the Watchers whose job it was to guide and train the young slayer of vampires, Buffy Summers, a role he was to repeat in the spin-off series Angel.

Now he is in Liverpool preparing to play an American. Not that anything is easy in the world of theatre. Born in Maryland and raised in Seattle, it seems he has not got quite the right accent for the mid-American character he plays in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons.

So, like his fellow actors in the Liverpool Playhouse production, he has a dialect coach to help him get it right.

Denisof is used to the confusion over his background, as he explains in his Playhouse dressing room: "If I was a dog I would be a mutt." He came to Britain to study drama as a young man and stayed for 15 years.

"My interest was in classical theatre so I thought Britain would be the right place to come," he says of the three years he spent at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and ended up in Hamlet. "I enjoyed that job playing Fortinbras, a chance to watch Mark Rylance playing Hamlet each night and some other great actors.

"I had a lot of fun in the West End in Tovarich, a French farce with Robert Powell, and I was in Rope in Chichester with Tony Head who would later be in Buffy, of course." But there was also a lot of television, including three episodes of Sharpe and a movie, Faith, which he filmed in Liverpool with Michael Gambon.

"It was the story of a scandal in Parliament and Michael and I were meant to be lovers, although neither of us has that particular inclination. We were constantly greeting each other with politically incorrect monikers whenever we saw one another and there was a lot of giggling in the intimate scenes!"

Unfortunately, he saw little of the city. "With filming, your memories are usually of arriving at a hotel and leaving it in the morning bleary-eyed to go on a film set."

It was a holiday in Los Angeles that changed his life. An independent film he made with Parker Posey, The Misadventures of Margaret, shown at the Sundance Film Festival, got the TV moguls interested.

"I really did just plan a holiday to see the sights but I have been there ever since. I had a couple of phone calls and next thing I knew I was in meetings at NBC. I lucked into the pilot of a television series which was never made, but it gave me a calling card in Los Angeles."

He was signed up for a TV mini-series Noah’s Ark, made in Australia with Mary Steenburgen, before returning to LA. "I thought the holiday had gone bloody well but | needed to get back to my house in London where I had left the tea on the sideboard and the post was piling up."

Instead, he was asked to another meeting, this for "a show with a crazy name, Buffy the Vampire Slayer". The series was then in its third season. Together with Angel, it took up six years of his life.

"It was a tremendous experience as television is really the engine room of Los Angeles. On set every day, you had the blessing of its incredible creator Joss Whedon with wonderful stories every week. It was fantasy but heart-breaking reality as well."

It was also tough. With theatre and film work, there is usually an end date in sight, he says. But, with long-running television series like Buffy and Angel, it is different.

"You made 22 episodes a year which was a long 10 months and in our show, a lot of the action took place at night so you would start the week being on set at 6am and doing a 14 to 16 hour day and end it by going out on the streets at 6pm and working until the sun came up the next day." he says.

"It leaves you in a perpetual state of jet-lag, as it was also a physically demanding show with lots of fights, chase scenes and special effects.

"You would find you would have your big emotional scene at 5.48 in the morning, six minutes before sun up."

The best thing which came out of the show, he says, was meeting his now wife, Alyson Hannigan, who played Willow.

Love at first sight? "We have different stories," he laughs. "My side of the case is that I liked her straight off but was hesitant about working and having a relationship at the same time. I was a slow starter on the romantic side of things, so we were just friends for about a year before we started going out. She would say I was flirting ruthlessly the whole time."

He is delighted to be back in the theatre, something he has not done for some time. He is playing Chris, one of the sons of All My Sons, returned from the war a changed man.

He has a father Joe, played by Michael Byrne, suspected of dodgy dealings in the war and a girl played by Alice Patten who was once the girlfriend of a brother presumed to have been killed in action.

"It is an amazing play, one of the great dramas which still speaks to us in our own time, he says. "It addresses dilemmas both moral and political with which Britain, America and the West are still struggling. At its heart, however, is the story of a family and we all have a family."