..and then there were wes! \\ suomalainen fanisivusto Alexis Denisofille

"Half Price" - Xposé #65

Way back in season three of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Giles has a nasty shock when he was sacked from his job by the Watcher´s Council. Naturally, with a vacancy existing, someone else had to fill in the position of guardian to not just Buffy but new arrival Faith as well. Thus began the reign of terror of Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, freshly trained and raring to go. Well, okay, so it was more a reign of uselessness and running away, but let´s not get bogged down in technicalities. The person behind the pompous Englishness is Canadian actor Alexis Denisof. After spending a little while getting used to his actual voice [his English accent is near-flawless], it seemed a good idea to begin at the beginning.
"I had been over in LA on a holiday with some mates, had just broken up with my girlfriend and had lucked into couple of auditions, one of which led to doing a pilot for a series for FOX", explains Denisof. "We shot that in Canada and it didn´t end up being picked up. And then I landed another job which shot in Australia, an NBC mini-series, Noah´s Ark . On the way back to London [where I lived at the time], I stopped off in LA to see my agents over here and check in with them, and the said, 'Oh well, before you take off, an audition came for in for a couple of episodes of Buffy', which was a show I´d never heard of because it hadn´t begun in England by then".
"So i said, 'Well, that´s a funny-sounding old name, what kind of show is that?', so they told me a little bit about it. I had bumped into my friend Tony Head [Giles in Buffy], who had said, 'Oh, there´s this part you might be very good for, if you´re interested', so I thought, 'Well, I´ll stick around and meet them', and went in and met Joss [Whedon, Buffy executive producer, creator and all-around genious], read for the part and just hit it off with him right away."
"We saw something very funny and peculiar in the role of Wesley that we both liked and so they wrote him in for a couple of shows and the intention at that point was to kill him off; this was about halfway trough season three. Meanwhile, I´m still trying to get back to London, you know, get another couple of shirts and wash up the moldy cup of tea, that´s been sitting on the sideboard for by now six or eight months," he laughs.
Of course, Wesley survived the season, but, sacked by the Watcher´s Council for his poor handeling of the Faith situation, disappeared for a while. The next times he appeared was in LA, when he went unsubtly seeking gainful employment at Angel Investigations claiming to be a rogue demonhunter. Denisof had a new problem to face, however. He was joining spin-off show Angel one episode after the death of Doyle, a character that became popular quickly with fans. Was this a tough act to follow?
"Yeah, there was definitely mixed response", considers the actor. "I consider that a challenge, to be perfectly honest. I was delighted because I knew what Joss and David Greenwalt [Angel co-creator and executive producer] had in store for Wesley and I knew they were going to to take a good long time and really evolve the character. I knew the ideas, that I had, that I wanted to bring in, and then to do that in the face of adversityjust makes it all the more tasty."
"It´s nice to suprise people and to show them that a book isn´t necessarily it´s cover, and that´s what I think Wesley is all about. He has hidden depths and complexities that have been discovered consistently troughout the years of the show. And each season it just get better and better, I think, for that character."
"I felt like there was an attitude that Wesley was replacing Doyle, and I think that´s sort of a misnomer because it just happens to coincide that Doyle´s death is shortly before Wesley´s arrival.