Anthony Head

Anthony Head by Bel Jacobs, November 17th, 2003

60 SECONDS EXTRA!: In the 1980s, Anthony Head played the romantic lead in the Gold Blend adverts; in the 1990s, he was Rupert Giles, the bumbling intellectual battling evil in cult US TV series Buffy The Vampire Slayer. His next role is Andrew Barton, a gynaecological surgeon with a penchant for performing unnecessary hysterectomies, in the new comedy Reversals for ITV1

What will you miss about Buffy?

Seeing everyone. We were a really close group and they were very interesting, talented people.

Do you like the idea of a team that builds up over years?

If it’s right. It all comes from the top. Joss [Whedon, creator of Buffy] is an incredibly generous person and that couldn’t help but filter down. I’ve heard about sets where whoever’s in charge is insecure and defensive. That can wreak havoc on a team. You hear about some of these American sets where the atmosphere was just lethal. I did a job with someone recently and he said that, if he had to do a scene with the leading woman, she was never there - someone read her part for her. People ask me what Sarah [Michelle Gellar, who plays Buffy] was like: she was always there and did every scene with equal intensity whether she was off camera or on.

Giles had this dark side that you occasionally saw flashes of. Did you enjoy that side of him?

Of course. That’s why I’m playing Captain Hook.

Panto?

Not really. We’re doing Peter Pan and Pirates of Penzance at the Savoy.

You must have turned down loads of offers to play characters like Giles.

Yes - professors, London gentlemen. But Giles himself was an about-turn. Before Buffy, I’d always played baddies or romantic heroes. But when I went out to the States, I made a conscious effort to open things up. When Giles came along, I thought: great; this isn’t a romantic hero, this is a character.

You’ve got an American lilt going there.

Have I? I hope somebody beats it out of me very, very soon.

Tell me about Gold Blend.

They wanted someone with a particular kind of twinkle, so that the audience were never sure where the guy is going. I did try and put a few flaws in but he ended up a bit of a smoothie. Anybody in their right mind would have hated him.

How did the campaign end?

I actually pulled the plug. We had done 12 and I felt that it had done its thing. And if you don’t walk away, you don’t open yourself to other possibilities. But the money was very liberating. I was able to say: ’No, I am not going to do anything for a year after my first child is born.’ And, since then, I’ve been in an extremely enviable position of being able to say no. As an actor, it is a very, very rare opportunity.

Has the campaign changed the way you feel about coffee?

That has got to be your editor’s question. No - actually, that’s mine. I was feeling a little fazed. Only in as much fans used to bring coffee round as a joke.

And now you’re playing another dubious character.

Yes, he [Andrew Barton, Head’s character in Reversals] is very much the villain. But very few people are bastards for the sake of it. I like to think about their agenda. What is their paranoia? What are their insecurities?

He takes out women’s uteruses without their permission?

It was something that happened in the 1960s and 70s. Barton’s justification is that these women are costing the NHS money.

I hear your wife Sarah is a horse-whisperer.

Lots of animals - when they’re bowling about as puppies, kittens or fowls - will break or sprain themselves and that has a knock-on effect later in life. A lot of behaviour we interpret as bad temper can come down to that. There was a pig at this rescue centre who squealed uncontrollably when someone went near her. Sarah thought the pig might be blind. So the people there changed the way they worked with her - and now she’s their mascot.

It sounds like a process of educating people as well.

As soon as you understand the problem, it completely changes the way you deal with the animal and the animal itself will begin changing. Reversals begins on Wednesday, at 9pm on ITV1.