Anthony Head

Anthony Head: slaying ’em in the aisles

Mar 19 2004

He played the super cool Mr Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and was the quintessential smooth dude in the ’80s Gold Blend advert. Now Anthony Head is back in theatreland playing at being a pirate. He finds more than a few things in common with HANNAH JONES

Hannah Jones, The Western Mail

The train is late, massively late in fact. In less than an hour Anthony Head should be opening at the Savoy with Pirates of Penzance and Peter Pan. But another booming, bored-sounding announcement from a troubled guard tells him there’s no chance he’s going to make it.

He’s stuck somewhere between Bath - his home - and London - his professional base.

Not that he’s at all worried that he’ll miss the curtain call.

To hear him speak you’d think he was on some Caribbean beach somewhere, lapping up rays on his wonderfully-British face.

Relaxed and as cool as his coffee advert persona, he personifies the words of that great Doris Day track.

And I think it went something like Que Sera.

"Oh well," muses the actor in a half sigh.

"I suppose the company manager better find the number of my understudy from somewhere.

"Poor bloke won’t know what’s hit him.

"But that’s life, isn’t it? Not a lot one can do about a dodgy train. The world doesn’t revolve around me or the theatre. I’ll get there when I get there."

Head, so laid back you’d think he was horizontal, has agreed to talk to me about the double-header he’s got going on in the West End at the moment.

He’s difficult to get hold of - he’s a Hollywood star on the small screen at least you know - and is at a certain stage in his career that he can pick and choose who interviews him.

But admitting we have something in common opens him up like a eagerly-pawed paperback, and nothing becomes off limits.

No, it’s not that we’re both fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - me from a distance, he because he was in it for seven successful series.

And it’s not because I like coffee - his debonair charm which oozed from the soap opera that was the Gold Blend advert in the 80s made me convert to that particular blend.

No. It’s more boring than that. You see my friend Jayne from Ebbw Vale married a bloke called John who bought a house round the corner from Head’s in Bath.

John, a builder, was hired to build a tree house for his two children - more like a palatial bungalow in a branch - and then did some other work for him. So, inevitably, they all became rather friendly.

Jayne and John got divorced but by now the Heads and the Langleys and their two kids were all big pals. The children played together as well as share the same public school.

Head is now John’s landlord and lives in a barn he owns so he can be near his kids in Timsbury and still pops round Jayne’s when she’s not in Ebbw Vale visiting her mother. Keeping up?

It’s a tenuous link, granted.

But when it comes to establishing some sort of common ground between you and a stranger, even a really famous one, no piece of well-trodden track if too rocky to tread.

"Oh, you know John and Jayne do you? He’s lovely isn’t he. And his kids. So, are you from Ebbw Vale then?" he asks. "Never been there myself. Bet they don’t have train trouble there."

No, I think to myself, we don’t even have a train service.

But I don’t bother to interrupt the actor because now, suitably comfortable talking to someone who knows someone who knows someone else, we’re up and running.

In order to understand the point at where Head is at in his career, you have to look at what he’s achieved, fairly late in life in acting terms.

For years he fleeted around the scenes, doing bit parts here and there.

Theatre was his great love, but after a stint of not really getting that much major work he decided to make a coffee commercial which, instead of being a slow brew career wise, catapulted him into the froth that is the American market.

It was the will they/won’t they on-screen romance with Sharon Maughan that hooked an entire nation.

"Some people would think that doing an advert that was as successful as the Gold Blend one would be a curse for the rest of your life, but they couldn’t be more wrong in my case," says Head.

"What it did in real terms was give me a comfort zone in which I could say no to stuff that I didn’t really want to do but had to do for one reason or another.

"And on the back of that I was able to go to the States where I got an agent and then landed Buffy.

"Amazing really."

Head, despite roles in the MI5 drama Spooks, Jonathan Creek, Manchild and Little Britain, will always be known as either the coffee man or the Buffy bloke.

But neither moniker worries him as he is grateful of the opportunities which have landed at his door.

Having starred in one of Britain’s most memorable adverts, he was also the only British accent to be heard in the massively successful Buffy where he played her rather stuffy watcher, Mr Giles.

Although he bowed out in 2002 to spend more time with his family and work more steadily in Britain, he is still enamoured with the whole experience.

"In many ways I felt that part was written for me.

"Joss (Wheadon, the creator) and I got really close and when things were happening me to me in real life, I’d read the script and find out that similar things were happening to my character on the show.

"Like when I told Joss I wanted to go home, suddenly my character became very isolated in the show.

"He was always really sensitive to the way I was feeling at any given time and he knew how hard it was for me to be away from my family for such long periods of time.

"It was a great ensemble cast and it gave me the chance to show British actors on American television as being people with some depth.

"The character of Mr Giles had that kind of depth so I wasn’t over there playing some English buffoon.

"There’s still some talk of a Buffy offshoot starring Giles, but we’ll have to wait and see what happens with that one.

"At the moment I’m loving being back at home, working here and being able to be a dad and husband again."

Although there are few projects "at home" which could garner the same amount of perks that Head reaped doing Buffy, he says being back in Bath with his children and wife Sarah means that he feels less guilty about taking plum parts that take him away daily.

He’s recently made the film based on the characters from the Viz comic, Fat Slags, and will soon be seen on the BBC in the drama New Tricks.

But he’s currently making the seven trips to London a week to star in Peter Pan and Pirates, a small price to pay for being closer to his family - even though he’s frequently delayed.

Although largely critically panned, Head says he is "having a ball" playing Captain Hook as well as belting out numbers and mastering the tongue-twisting patter in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates.

"It’s a fantastic opportunity for me, something really different to what I’ve been doing recently.

"It’s like a big experiment, doing two shows a day at the same venue.

"They have barely enough time to change the props," he laughs.

"But it’s great to be back in Britain doing something I love, being close to the family.

"Some people ask me how I managed to be away from the family for such a long time when I was doing Buffy.

"But I wasn’t on an oil rig working.

"I was paid really well and the perks were great.

"Yes, it was a sacrifice. But I hope it was worth it in the end.

"But you know what? There really is no place like home."

And I’m not surprised he’d say that - John’s ex-wife Jayne told me he might.