Buffy The Vampire Slayer

It’s been a while since we got a good Giles fix. Sure, there are Buffy, the Vampire Slayer reruns and DVD sets, and those sing-a-long events for Once More with Feeling. There’s even some new Giles in the Season Eight comic book series, but it’s not the same. So here’s your major Giles fix. Anthony Stewart Head is guest starring in the BBC drama Hotel Babylon, where each week the staff helps new guests satisfy their desires. The show airs on BBC America, and Head indulged all the Buffy fandom questions while he was here.

Crave Online: Are you aware of the Season Eight comic book series? Anthony Stewart Head: He sent me a couple. It’s very interesting stuff. It’s great stuff. I want him to make more TV and more film. He’s a great comic book writer and I think it’s time to have him back again. But anything that Joss is involved with is always class, it’s always well written and beautifully turned out.

Crave Online: Do read that and think maybe you’d like to be acting that? Anthony Stewart Head: Yeah, yeah. In retrospect, I know that seven seasons was long enough. At the same time, it would be nice to revisit some of that. So who knows. Sometime down the line we might, if we’re not all too old.

Crave Online: What do you think of what Giles is doing? Anthony Stewart Head: Basically he sent me the first one. I haven’t seen anything after that.

Crave Online: Wait, Giles isn’t even in the first one. Anthony Stewart Head: Well, he’s just there. A tiny bit. You got a little taste. As I was saying, I love what Joss has done and I hope he does more. Who knows if anything will ever come to the screen but we want him back to do some movies and some TV.

Crave Online: Do you and Joss ever still talk about doing Ripper? Anthony Stewart Head: We talk about it. It’s not dead. I’d like to think one day we might do something with it but we talk about it ad infinitum. We do talk about other stuff but he always says he wants to do it sometime.

Crave Online: Are you aware of the sing-a-longs people attend for Once More with Feeling? Anthony Stewart Head: I heard about it, yeah. I was asked if I could come to something, there was a special showing here.

Crave Online: Have you been to one? Anthony Stewart Head: No, I’d love to. Do people dress up and do the full Rocky Horror thing.

Crave Online: It’s not Rocky Horror because no one is making fun of it. But there is audience participation like opening poppers when Tara sings, "You make me com…plete." Anthony Stewart Head: [Laughs] Fantastic. You mean that innuendo wasn’t lost on the audience? You see, that’s what you can get away with and what you can’t get away with. Joss Whedon got away with a few great little moments. There’s a moment where Willow actually said fu** but they cut it. She jumped time just as she said it. He had her saying something else, "Oh forget…" or something like that, so he cut it on "Oh, f- -" so the network couldn’t stop it.

Crave Online: So what is your character’s special request of Hotel Babylon? Anthony Stewart Head: I play a suicidal jingle writer who actually, during the show, writes a very, very bad jingle about PMS. We talked about where to pitch it and we pitched it slightly too high. I had to really sing high for it but I sang it in earnest. Basically they accidentally put me in the penthouse suite and suddenly realized that I could throw myself off the balcony. So Max [Beesely] does a very good job of placating me and just making things work for me. I nearly electrocute myself with my keyboard in the bath.

Crave Online: So we’ll get to hear you sing again? Anthony Stewart Head: Yes, well, badly because I sang in earnest. I wasn’t going to do like a comedy turn on it but it was excruciating.

Crave Online: And there’s a hopeful message because he saves you? Anthony Stewart Head: It has to be said it’s a show with a wry smile. It’s got a real glossy look. It looks very spectacular and it’s a fun show.

Crave Online: What is your best real life hotel story? Anthony Stewart Head: I don’t know if I’ve got one. Hotels are sort of very much like my charactere. You find when you’re in a hotel, its’ very faceless. I’m always just kind of sad to be away from home. I don’t have anything decadent.

Crave Online: So that’s one episode. What else are you working on? Anthony Stewart Head: I did an episode of Dr. Who which is excellent. It’s called School Reunion and I got to play a really particularly unpleasant headmaster who ate children actually. Teachers and everybody else but he would snack on children. At the moment, I’m doing a comedy for England called Sold, it’s about realtors. There’s something that I can’t talk about yet which is very exciting. I’m supposed to be doing a film right now. I couldn’t have been here if I was doing the film which was based on Opera. I was going to be singing in Cosi Fan Tutte which would have been really cool but it didn’t work out.

Crave Online: That’s off for good?

Anthony Stewart Head: I don’t know. The money dropped out two days before we were supposed to start so it’s one of those. In England at the moment, financing films is very, very precarious. I’m hoping to talk to a couple of politicians. My local MP is interested in talking about how we can get it back to a state of normality.

Crave Online: How much fun was it to be a villain on Dr. Who? Anthony Stewart Head: Oh, it was fantastic, I have to tell you. If you ever get to see it, I was really pleased with it. My first scene was a Mexican standoff by the side of the school swimming pool. I kept it quite low and menacing and they said, "Don’t forget that this is Dr. Who. You can up the ante. You can make it quite over the top." Which is like a red rag to a bull. I got to do some stuff. It regressed. I got not over the top. I did get to do a scream, a screech that is the last shot that I did. I don’t know if you remember the Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland, but at the end of it he does this thing. I found out I could do it, so all this time it’s something I’ve been waiting to do. When it came to the actual shot, amazingly we were in this very echo-y stairwell and I did this thing and the crew literally stopped where they stood. In fact, they’ve augmented it a little electronically.

Crave Online: Are there prosthetics on you? Anthony Stewart Head: No, no, it’s me. I look a little bit like Mr. Hopkins in his Hannibal Lecter role. My hair is slicked back.

Crave Online: You know we can’t wait to hear you sing again.

Anthony Stewart Head: Thank you very much. I might be working with somebody. There’s been so much pressure to do another album. I might be working with a lovely guitarist, a guy that used to work with Seal. When I get back, I’ve got some of his songs with me now, sort of looking at working on something. We’ll see. We might put out a little EP and see how it goes down. Crave Online: Would George Sarah be involved again?

Anthony Stewart Head: Not planned to because that was a one off. One of the things that came very strongly from the fans is they wanted an acoustic album, so Gus is a doll. He wrote Kiss From a Rose with Seal.

Crave Online: With Sold, is Britain having the same sort of property bubble we have here? Anthony Stewart Head: Oh yeah. They keep saying, the Bank of England keeps saying, it’s gonna stop, it’s going to end soon and it doesn’t. It just keeps going. It’s extraordinary.

Crave Online: What’s funny about the real estate market or realtors? Anthony Stewart Head: They are the supreme salesman. They’ll sell you a cupboard and tell you it’s a beautiful home with a moderate outlook. Not all of them of course but the more ambitious amongst them are figures of fun. I play the boss of the company. I’m sort of omnipresent. I appear at all sorts of times. It’s very funny and it stars a couple of very, very good young rising stars there, a guy called Kris Marshall and Bryan Dick. They’re very good.

Crave Online: What kind of personality is your character as the boss? Anthony Stewart Head: I kind of modeled him on Alan Sugar who is our equivalent of Donald Trump. He does the English Apprentice. He’s an electronics salesman and he’s very serious. He doesn’t joke very much. Very serious about work. He’s a bit like a newscaster but he’s got this innate power. People are really scared of him so I modeled him on that.

Crave Online: Is it nice to do straight comedy? You have a sense of humor and most of your roles have a lot of gravitas. Anthony Stewart Head: Yes, even Little Britain. I’d be very interested to know what they get away with in Little Britain. There’s some serious shock value in that. Yeah, I played the Prime Minister so there was a deal of gravitas but I’ve done a few bits and pieces of comedy. I’ve got a movie coming out in August in England. I hope it’s going to make it here. It’s called Sparkle where I play Stockard Channing’s gay brother. I did a pilot last year which they’re still talking about, playing a petulant gay rock star.

Crave Online: At least you got to sing. Anthony Stewart Head: I did get to sing. Actually, I got to sing a couple of Elton John songs. Elton and his manager put this thing together and I got to sing a couple of songs that he especially wrote for it. It’s cool, I had a rock band and everything. I had screaming fans and I had to keep pinching myself that they were being paid to. It’s great, it’s lovely. I do the thing and it’s cool.