Here's a new game you can play. Rewatch the Angel episode "Underneath" and see if you can work out which was the first scene David Boreanaz recorded after learning that his show had been axed. "Joss Whedon came to me when we were working on episode 17 and said he wanted to speak to me," Boreanaz recalls on the phone from his LA home, just a few days before shooting the show's last ever episode. "I said, 'What's up?' He sounded really down and he said, 'Oh, things aren't good - the meeting with Jordan Levin [Co-CEO of the WB Network] wasn't good.' Then he spelled it out. My first reaction was, 'Okay...'"
"Okay?" That seems, even for the habitually pragmatic Boreanaz, a rather cool response to the final curtain call on an eight-year role. But the man who's been breathing life - if you can use such a term about a vampire - into Angel since Buffy's first season has sound reasons for treating the news as a double-edged sword.
"There has been a lot of pressure on me throughout the seasons of the show and it felt like a big weight had been lifted off my shoulders," he sighs. "To be completely honest, it was a feeling of rejuvenation for me. It felt like a cleaning process - it made me look back on a period of my life and realise what was good and exorcise what was bad about it. And then I could put it all aside and move on, so I felt very light."
He admits that the emotions he is going through are bittersweet. "It's kind of like cranberry juice: there are some benefits to it - in terms of cleansing - but at the same time it's bitter. I think that the show was given a nice, tall glass of cranberry juice."
He also has ambivalent feelings towards the network that axed his show: "I think the WB Network is in a rather strange place right now. I mean, they've been great to us and very supportive, but I also think they have a responsibility to the fans. This is a bittersweet ending. It's sweet on my behalf in that I'm able to spread my wings and go forward with my career and play other characters that I think will be very much enhancing to me. But then it's bitter for the Angel fans. I love the fans, and it would have been great to give them a proper one-year send off rather than to have it go so unexpectedly."
Many fans had already realised that the writing was on the wall - presumably in blood - for the show since the start of season five. This final season was only given the go-ahead at the eleventh hour, and the WB Network demanded changes that would make Angel more accessible to casual viewers. The format was altered significantly, with Angel and co taking over the evil legal firm Wolfram and Hart, while Spike - one of the most popular characters on Buffy - was resurrected in a transparent, but artfully handled, ratings-grabbing move. The result was improved ratings, but the show still wasn't getting the numbers the network desired.
"The decision to cancel was purely a business one," admits Boreanaz. "The WB Network looked at it creatively and at the business end of it. However, I felt sure that we could have done another season with what they did in terms of retooling the show for this year."
This attitude may surprise some of the scurrilous rumour mongers on the net who seemed determined to stir up bad feeling, claiming Boreanaz was not keen on having the blonde bloodsucker come on the show to steal his spotlight. Boreanaz laughs at the suggestions. Nothing could be further from the truth, he reckons.
"No. I think their relationship was the one thing that could have been touched on more," he says emphatically. He points to episode 20, "The Girl in Question", about Angel and Spike's misadventures in Venice searching for Buffy, as the way he would like to have seen the show develop. "I think one of the funny parts about episode 20 was that these two heroes are really just rejects, a bit like Abbott and Costello characters. It made sense to me and I wish that this season had been geared more around those two. Not to say that what we've done this year wasn't fantastic, because for me the first and last seasons have been the best years of Angel's entire run. If you look at the way that the characters were used I think it was ripe for another season, but it was a financial decision to axe the show."
As we know now, Spike and Angel never did bump into the Slayer. There were plans afoot to bring Sarah Michelle Gellar back onto Angel, but these were scuppered by her filming schedule on The Grudge. "It would have been nice," reflects Boreanaz. "But we touched a bit on their relationship in episode 20. David Greenwalt directed, and I thought it was a really good episode, with Spike and Angel going to Rome to find Buffy and never quite getting to her. It was very funny. But it would have been interesting to see that relationship resolved, though I wouldn't know how it could be done. My job has been to play Angel. I've had fun doing it and if Buffy and the other characters were to come back on board, I would have welcomed them with open arms. But it's not my decision."
Throughout the interview Boreanaz has a schizophrenic attitude towards the WB Network. For every pragmatic, "it was a business decision," there's a "they should be ashamed of themselves". You get the distinct feeling that, after eight years, he relishes the chance to spread his wings, but will genuinely miss making the show, and feels that there have been missed opportunities. "I think that the WB's marketing strategy was different from how they market other shows and they put all their eggs in one basket," he muses, adding that he'll miss the crew, the cast, and the fact that they were so unified. "It was fun to be around them talking about whose football team's gonna win next weekend. Cheering for your sports teams. That kind of thing."
But for every cloud... "I won't miss the late nights and the early Saturday mornings driving home after a long week. I know every corner, every alleyway, every building and every place in downtown Los Angeles."
You may have thought that having played the same character for eight years now, Boreanaz might have a few worries about typecasting. His riposte to that is that he hasn't been playing the same character for eight years.
"If I look at Angel's involvement in the early years of Buffy, he was a mystery. You didn't know much about him at all. He was just a recurring character. Then I got signed on and started to explore the character and got my own show. That opened up large doors for both my career and my personality. I'm very proud of creating this character, a multi-faceted individual. He's a hero. He's a villain. He's agnostic. He's simplified. He's a romancer. He's charming. He's disillusioned. He's sarcastic. He's funny. All of those character traits that I've worked on with Angel will only enhance the characters that I play in the future. Every role that you do is defined by your last part; what I do is challenge myself as an actor by becoming another person - wearing masks in different situations.
"I will probably be typecast for a time, sure. No one's knocking on my door right now for romantic leads - it's not like hey, I'm the first person that they think of. I need to show them what I can do, and that's the exciting part of the job. I'm basically saying to them, 'Get me in a room with you for five minutes and I'll change your mind.'"
Asked to pick one favourite memory from his time on the show, Boreanaz has no hesitation, though his choice is an unexpected one: "There are lots of memories, but the first thing that pops into my mind was when Glenn Quinn came in to audition for Doyle. He was so very funny that I couldn't stop laughing. Wild and Irish, he was a great spirit. It was just one of those memorable experiences."
Boreanaz also claims that Quinn was probably the only real friend he had on the show. "From the inception of this whole ride I've been on for years, revolving around doing my work and getting out, the only friend I had from the show as far as hanging out was Glenn Quinn. As for the rest, we just saw each other at an event or something."
So presumably Quinn's death from a drug overdose in 2002 must have hit hard?
"I still think about it. I don't think I've put enough closure onto that, but maybe I will some day..."
And so, to the future...
"Everybody asks me about the future. I'm so fed up of the barrage of questions about the future!" Boreanaz groans theatrically. "Everybody wants to know what's next..."
He's joking though. We think. Certainly once you get him on the subject, he doesn't hold back.
"I have the The Crow: Wicked Prayer in the can. They're still doing optical effects on that in post-production. I don't think they'll show the film until the last special effect is completed. But I have a pretty good feeling that it will be this year. As far as my plans after Angel, I will be taking a nice little rest and enjoying my son and my wife."
Is he looking to star in another hour-long TV drama? I don't know. You're asking that question at the end of a season. That's pretty loaded. You ask anybody after a long run and they just need some time to kind of get away from it all. Ash me that in the next couple of months and see where I'm at then."
But is he at all worried about the David Duchovny Syndrome, whereby big TV stars vaporise soon after long, successful runs?
"I don't know. But I'm sure David Duchovny is doing some great stuff somewhere. Hollywood's a funny place. You watch somebody for an extensive period of time and all of a sudden it's over and it's not that they disappear; they're just doing other projects that haven't come to fruition yet.!
Yeah, in Britain it's called doing panto...
"It's about evolving and changing," Boreanaz continues. "I don't consider it like, 'Hey, I'm going off to be part of the Fading Hollywood Story Gang and get drunk and find myself laying down naked in some alleyway'. That's not me. I have a great sense of who I am as a person; it's all retrospective of who you are and where you come from. People take on different roles all the time - it's not like they're not doing anything. It's just that they're not the flavour of a particular month.
"The job is ever-changing. It's always evolving and it evolves in either a good way or a bad way depending on what kind of choices you make. I don't have a formula for staying power, but I have a strong sense of self that I will go forward with."
Of course, the fans are never going to let the legacy of Angel die, and there's already been talk - well, pie-in-the-sky speculation, to be honest - of a big screen incarnation of the show. Boreanaz wouldn't say no. "If it's presented correctly and the right people were on board, sure I'd do it. You never shut down your options. I would definitely do Angel as a terrific feature film, but who know's what's gonna be going on in my life when and if it comes up?"
He also realises that series creator Joss Whedon is ready to move on. "Joss is working on his new installment of Firefly, now called Serenity, and I'm happy for him - I think that he's in that trip right now. So I can't say that an Angel film is definitely going to happen. Who knows? Or, it might be brought to the big screen 20 years from now, when I'd be too old to play the part. It may have a stronger impact later on in my life. Whether or not I'm part of that, somehow it will happen. Look what they did with old TV shows like Starsky and Hutch'."
Let's hope a 50- something Boreanaz gets more than a cameo role as a security guard if it does.
Boreanaz reckons that at least the show went out on a high. Among many of the highlights of season five for the actor was seeing himself in puppet form.
"I loved it. I thought it was very ingenious. It was a great story, a great job and it was one of the better episodes of the show. I liked the way the puppeteers did their work and the time I had to work with them. The way it was shot... it just worked! If they give the puppet to me, I'll pass it down to my son."
Ah yes, that'll be little Jaden, to whom Boreanaz's wife, Jaime Bergman, gave birth on 1 May 2002. Another one of those silver linings about Angel's axing is that the actor can spend more time "connecting" with his son.
"You just find out how beautiful life is," says Boreanaz of being a new dad. "With a baby in your arms, it's another time, another place; a tiny creature just to be held and coddled, and who laughs and cries... it's just beautiful."
So what one great piece of wisdom would he like to instill in Jaden for the future?
"Something I learned form my own father: to respect yourself and others. Be strong, be confident. It's who you are as a person, first and foremost. It's about getting to the place that enables you to be the true, simple person you are inside. That is the most beautiful spot to be in."
Boreanaz's wife, Jaime, is an ex-model and actress. So there'll be two jobbing thesps in the family now.
"She's been on the pilot train this winter, doing her own thing." says Boreanaz. "She's done a bunch of episodics, including some sitcom stuff. Jaime has great comedy timing. And, of course, having a child is the best thing that's happened to both of us. But it is always a bigger sacrifice for a woman; I don't know how she does it."
So now that Angel appears to be a thing of the past, how does Boreanaz think the show will be remembered? "I don't consider this show a force to be reckoned with, like a show that's a part of the three big networks. Angel was a very cult-orientated show from the start. It was under the radar. It didn't get the amount of success that Buffy had and that could be a positive thing in the long run. I mean a lot of people still don't know how good the show is or what it's all about."
If nothing else, Angel has made its mark on Boreanaz's sartorial tastes. The man who once boasted to SFX, "I can wear pink shirts that nobody else can pull off" has performed a U-turn.
"Nope," he muses when we ask him if he's going to take this opportunity to make a colourful clothing statement. "I'm going to stay black. Once you go black, that's it."
Courtesy of TDBUK
A big thank you to Karen who typed the interview out. |
