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Angel

David Boreanaz - At 100, Angel bites into a new future - Scifi.com Interview

By Patrick Lee

Sunday 8 February 2004, by Webmaster

At 100 (episodes), Angel bites into a new future while remembering the past

By Patrick Lee

he WB’s vampire series Angel will celebrate its 100th episode, "You’re Welcome," on Feb. 4, marking the return of onetime series regular Charisma Carpenter, and affording cast and crew a chance to reflect on the show’s five-year journey through the underbelly of supernatural Los Angeles.

Here’s how the network describes the milestone episode: "Cordelia (Carpenter) mysteriously awakens from her coma and is shocked to discover that instead of fighting against the evil law firm, Wolfram & Hart, Angel (David Boreanaz) and the group are now running it. Realizing that Angel has lost his conviction to be a hero, Cordelia gives him the information and support he needs to get back on track. Meanwhile, while Angel has security keeping an eye on Eve (Sarah Thompson), her partner Lindsey (returning guest star Christian Kane) prepares to bring about Angel’s demise."

On Dec. 4 last year, the cast and crew gathered on Stage 5 at Paramount Pictures, home of the massive Wolfram & Hart set, to blow out the candles on a white-and-blood-red cake with the inscription "Angel 100." Guests included Joss Whedon, who co-created the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spinoff with David Greenwalt, and stars Boreanaz, James Marsters, Alexis Denisof, J. August Richards, Amy Acker, Andy Hallett, Mercedes McNab, Sarah Thompson and Kane, who returns after a lengthy hiatus to reprise the character of ousted evil Wolfram & Hart lawyer Lindsey McDonald.

The season has also seen a dramatic shift in tone, to more humorous and stand-alone episodes after last year’s epic apocalypse story arc. And, of course, the introduction of Marster’s Spike from the now-ended Buffy has stirred things up for Team Angel.

The cast and crew took a moment to speak with Science Fiction Weekly about Angel’s long journey and its future. The following comments have been compiled from interviews on the day of the 100th-episode party and The WB’s subsequent winter press tour in Hollywood.

David Boreanaz, you just directed your first episode [Jan. 21’s "Soul Purpose"]. Can you talk about the experience?

Boreanaz: I came in with a really strong game plan as far as what I wanted to do, looking at the script and some ideas. I came in with some really strong ideas and some strong visuals that I wanted to do, and I had a big ... meeting with [executive producer] Jeff Bell, and a lot of the ideas I wanted to do kind of got, not squashed, but just toned down a bit, because I had to remind myself that I am shooting an Angel show and not this crazy, cinematic, swooping thing.

As a director, you have a formula that you’re shooting, and that formula has to stay true to the storyline and to the Angel kind of motif. So that was challenging to kind of keep that. So my shots were really determined upon the scenes. I had a lot of ... interior flashbacks of my mind, and was it a dream? Was it not a dream? And I had a great time doing it. Once I got rolling with it, though, I found that my best opportunities came after I rehearsed, and they were messing around with the camera. I’d see the monitor, I’d come up with a different shot. And that’s how it kind of came to be for me, and I kind of shot off the cuff a lot towards the end as I got more comfortable with it, and that was great.

How did you keep the acting part separate from the directing part?

Boreanaz: It’s pretty crazy, yeah. You do your work, and there were moments when I was acting in it, and I had the [assistant director] call action or I would look at a little television monitor while I was setting the shot and rehearsing. So you’re mind’s really all over the place. But I enjoy working like that. The more that’s going on, the better for me creatively.

Do you want to do more directing?

Boreanaz: I don’t know. Yeah, I think so. Again, you’re directing your prescription. You’re directing a prescription that is for an already prescribed show. You have your limitations. You can put your mark on it, and I feel like I did that with this show that I directed. But then again, I’m not the show runner. I don’t get the final cut. I will have a director’s cut, and if anybody would like to see, it will be much longer. So that’s the way it is. That’s just what happens.

This season, things seem to have gotten a lot lighter. Is that true, and how long will that last?

Boreanaz: I don’t know. I think that we take each episode as they come, and I know the next four or five episodes coming out are really interesting and unique to a series that’s taken a big turn and is only going upwards. So I’m very confident that the storylines will remain intact as far as the small plot lines are concerned, with Spike and myself and what’s going to happen with Fred [Acker] and what’s going to happen to J [who plays Gunn]. And I think that all kind of unfolds. So we’re just letting it ride out. It’ll be light, but it’ll get dark, too. I think right now we’re at a good place.

There’s been no word yet on whether the network will pick up Angel for season six. What’s your sense of whether the show will be picked up for another year?

Boreanaz: I don’t know. I prescribe myself season to season, like I’ve always done. And once I hear word of that, that’s great, and we’ll see what happens this year.

You’re not tired of the character? You’ve been doing this for a long time [eight years, counting his appearances in Buffy].

Boreanaz: For the show it’s been a great five seasons and now ending a fifth season of the show. And I’ve loved it. I’ve loved everything about the character, and if the show were to go away, I would be very happy and pleased with where the character is right now. He’s very challenging. He still always makes it interesting. The writers always make it interesting for me to play him, and, God, he’s 250-something years old, so I don’t have to worry about backstory with him.

Can you talk about Joss’ being more heavily involved in the show this year? [In previous years, Whedon has found himself working on as many as three series at once, including Buffy, Angel and Firefly, as well as developing other projects.]

Boreanaz: Joss has been involved in the show since the inception of it, and people always ask me that question, and I feel as though his involvement has always been 120 percent every year. I don’t think it’s been either-or. I think that because he had a lot going on last year with Firefly and Buffy and this show, people are like, "Well, he’s now going to have much more attention." But to me that’s just bulls—t. I think that the type of artist that he is, and he comes up with an idea, he wants to see that come to fruition. That’s ... the type of artist that he is, and I respect him highly for that, and that’s what’s been so great working with Joss. That he doesn’t just say, "Well, I’m doing this, so forget about your show." I feel like he’s always been there, so I don’t see any difference.

Joss Whedon, Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy) won’t be making an appearance this season on Angel, even if it is the last year?

Whedon: Sarah last year said that she would be interested in coming on the show. And then this year, she ... said that it felt too soon. And that’s something that I actually understand. It’s very difficult when you throw something off that’s sort of taken over your life and your public persona for years and years and years, and you go off, it’s very difficult to just sort of say, "OK, I’m going to throw that back on on somebody else’s show and dive in again." And I think that’s probably what happened.

I don’t know that it’s a never. ... It was more just like, "Now’s not the time." And as writers, we have to go to our own characters and care more about that. And so it isn’t ... bad, I don’t think. You know, I mean, obviously I would love to see her on the show, and she’s welcome anytime she decides she is ready. But I don’t know if that will happen, and with a cast like that, it’s not my first priority.

With the guest appearance of Tom Lenk [Andrew], you revisited Slayer lore in the Jan. 28 episode "Damage."

Whedon: Yeah. So we wanted somebody from Sunnydale on the show, and we thought Andrew would be the person most likely to annoy everybody on Angel.

Can you talk about Charisma’s return to the show?

Whedon: It’s been 100 episodes. She was there at the beginning. [It’s a chance to ask] where are we now? Have we gotten better? Have we gotten worse? To take stock, that’s really what a 100th episode is for. To go back and say, here was the mission statement. If we made a hundred of these, there’s a reason we were talking about this. So let’s talk about it some more.

Is Connor [Vincent Kartheiser] coming back?

Whedon: We hope so. We haven’t made a deal or anything. We don’t know his schedule, but we definitely have a storyline.

That would be for this season?

Whedon: Yeah.

You have mentioned if the show doesn’t get picked up, this season will wrap up the series as well as the season.

Whedon: Yeah, that’s what I usually do, and I didn’t do it last year, because I didn’t know we were in danger of getting canceled. And I didn’t do it the year before, because I knew we weren’t going to be. But usually, my philosophy has always been, do an episode that ties up everything, but opens up some other things. And this season is no different. It’s very much a good way to go out, and a good way to start a completely new season.

Will it be as dramatic a change as it was last year?

Whedon: Well, I don’t know if we can afford a whole new set, but they will definitely not be living the way they’re living now.

At one point, you had a bunch of Buffy stuff cooking. There was a BBC show based on Giles’ character and an animated show. Are any of those going to happen now?

Whedon: Every now and then we get a nibble on the animated show. I’m very leery of it, because I would want it to be wonderful. I don’t have the talent pool that I had back then, or the time. And it’s hard to get the kind of money it takes to make really good animation. So I’m not sure how that’ll work out. The Giles thing I would love to do; again, that’s just a question of time.

James Marsters, the presence of Spike seems to have invigorated the show. Did you have any idea of the phenomenon your character would become?

Marsters: I still am resistant to think about that, because I think that in general, celebrity will destroy your soul. And if you concentrate too much on how popular you are or what the effect is out there, it just trips with your head. And I contemplated it a little too deeply one season, and it really was too trippy. And ... I’m so appreciative of it. It’s just wonderful. But what’s important is really what I do today. And if I suck or if I don’t suck. Because sometimes you suck. Like today, I had a fight scene that sucked. Seriously, it sucked.

What’s going to happen to Spike in this season of the show?

Marsters: Oh, man, I gave up trying to second-guess these writers so long ago. They go exactly the opposite direction. We just did a big fight between Angel and Spike, right? I would have bet ... my guitar on the fact that Angel was going to win that fight. I was like, "There’s no other way you can do it." Of course. Why would you do it the other way? And what they’ve done is open up Angel for a whole new arc of self-doubt and a whole new reason to try to redeem yourself beyond the reward. Genius. So I have no idea.

What I do know is that there seems to be a lot more dramatic potential between Angel and Spike than I once realized. When Joss wanted to bring me over to the show, I thought, "Well, it will be cool. I’ll make Angel’s life hard like I made Buffy’s life hard. That would be fun." But what I’m discovering, this is also interesting, things like Spike never bought that Angel was reformed. When he first, he was like, "Bulls—t. You’re still going to go kill people. I don’t buy that for a second." And ... it doesn’t register with Angel now that Spike has gotten his soul and is reformed. He does not see himself in Spike at all. And I think that’s because Angel has seen Spike do such horrendous evil that he just cannot believe that you can come back from that, and Spike doesn’t believe that Angel could come back from what he did. Even though they’re hoping to come back from doing what they’ve done. It’s a really wonderful doppelganger for [everything].

There’s a perception that you’re taking over the show from David. And it seems like the writers have picked up on the perception of tension between you two to create this tension between the characters.

Marsters: Well, yeah, but that was in there from the very first, from [the Buffy episode] "School Hard" [in which Spike first appeared]. ... And the whole Drusilla thing, of [Angel’s] glomming onto Drusilla, that was already stuff that we’d done before. ... I think because there’s tension between the characters is why this character and not another one from Buffy came over to the show. But yeah, between David and me functionally, there are no sparks at all. I am in awe of this guy. I’m serious. He’s the same guy that I met a long time ago filming Buffy, this guy that broke a f—king two-by-four with his head. Right? ... He was doing a gag where they had a wire in his back, and it went a little wrong, these things happen. It’s long hours. He went through with his head and broke it, and he’s bleeding. And he’s like, "[It’s] nothing, nothing." He’s hiding the blood, and he said, "Let’s just go." He just wanted to get the next take. He’s the same guy.

He directed a show this year, and he’s so good, I mean, he doesn’t know this really, but he’s so good that we forgot that he’s a first-time director, and we all got lazy with him, and we kind of left him in the ditch a little bit, and we had to remind ourselves, "S—t, David. We should be here for David, because he’s really a first-time director." But he had the quality of such confidence in knowing what he wanted to do one step at a time. ... And I asked him at the end of filming, I was like, "So, dude, you’ve read a lot of books, right? Directing and all that?" And he’s like, "No." And I said, "So, what, are you just acting like you know what you’re doing?" He’s like, "Yeah." But I’m like, "It’s so working." At the end of the day, maybe that’s what you need. He doesn’t really realize it, but he actually has [it], to the point where the crew is coming up to me, right? And they’re pressuring me to suggest that David gets another episode or two this year and [that] he be put into the time when we’re really tired so that we can have a strong director and we don’t have to stress out more than we need to.

Do you want to direct?

Marsters: I’m more interested in producing, frankly. As I see how things work in television specifically, I think the things that interest me as far as larger arcs of characters, as far as finding larger components to put to each other, as far as deciding what the story is that we’re going to tell and how we tell it, I’m kind of leaning towards wanting to do that and hire a director.

Talk about working with Charisma again.

Marsters: She’s wonderful, man. She’s wonderful. I was supposed to be the new Cordelia on Buffy, and it didn’t really work out that well, because I was a vampire, and I kept lighting on fire when I tried to get into the house. So, yeah, watching Cordy, watching Charisma at work, is like, "Oh, that’s what they wanted. The master’s at work. I see." She’s fabulous. She looks great. ... She kicks butt with a sword, too. That was this morning.

Alexis Denisof, your character, Wesley, joined the show in the middle of season one. Did you know you’d be here for the 100th episode?

Denisof: I never knew if he was going to stick around. So the job for me was to just try and make it as interesting and irritating as possible a character and hope that they’d find something for him to do the following week. And fortunately they are still doing that as we stand here. I don’t know how many episodes that character’s been around.

Are you prepared to do Angel for another three, four, five years?

Denisof: I think we’re just getting warmed up. Why, have you heard we’ve been picked up for three years?

I don’t know. What have you heard?

Denisof: Sadly, nothing. I mean, jeez, they really keep us dangling. I wouldn’t know.

Would you say your character has experienced the most change on the show?

Denisof: Oh, boy. The most? I don’t know if I could say the most, but it’s certainly been a great deal of change. I would agree with that.

Do you like the direction they’ve taken him so far?

Denisof: I really do. It’s a pleasure for an actor to have the chance to spend this amount of time with a character and be given the opportunity to evolve the character like we have over the years. So I’m definitely fortunate to have had that chance. Joss and the writers have always been coming up with great ideas and new directions for the character every season. And my job is just to take that as far as I can and make it as believable as I can and see where that leads us. We didn’t really know where we were going when Wesley joined the show, but we knew that he needed to change a lot and was going to change a lot. But could I have told you then that he’d have his throat slit and kidnap a child and have an affair with the enemy and ... shoot his father, so many amazing things? I definitely wouldn’t have been able to tell you that. It’s been an awful lot of fun. In a way, each time we reach a plateau, a new level of the character, I feel like this is the starting point. Now we’ve got where I can start with this guy. So that’s a good sign to me. That means we’ve got a lot of stories to tell and a lot of places we could take him.

Christian Kane, it’s a surprise to see you on the show again.

Kane: I like it.

What’s going on? Why are you back?

Kane: Well, I don’t even know that. I’m not even sure that Joss knows. And also I really can’t say where things are going. But, A, because I don’t know, and B, it wouldn’t be right, because Joss would probably kill me. But just, it was really nice to come back. ... The way we did it was we kept it really secretive and stuff. And I think some stuff leaked out that I was coming back in episode 10, or something like that, but no one had any idea that I going to be in episode eight.

That was the great thing about the very last scene in that episode. And Joss had the idea of not putting my name on it, no credit, no nothing, and just like just bringing it in. It was really fun. It was really fun. I just went to London and talked to some of the great, great fans that we’ve got out there and supposedly I hear like, I guess five minutes after the show aired, like six message boards crashed or something. Anytime I can do that and cause havoc, that’s just my style.

Are you the Big Bad for this season?

Kane: I’m always the Big Bad. Well, Spike and Angel are good now. They gotta have somebody come in and be evil. So that, you know, I have no problem doing it.

What was it like coming back to the set?

Kane: You know, it was little weird. I felt really comfortable in this character’s ... skin, because it’s me. Joss wrote the character, but I brought a lot to it. But it was very weird, because the first day back, David Boreanaz is directing me. So that was kind of cool, and it was just, it was a little awkward, because he’s a little bit different. There’s a lot of the same qualities, but he’s a little bit different. He’s a little bit more on another level now. So it was fun, I’ll tell you that.