Anthony Stewart Head

The heroine's protector in Buffy the Vampire Salyer tells Francis Grant that he's a firm believer in the spirit world.

An Englishman in Los Angeles has a handy advantage but Anthony Stewart Head does not presume New Zealanders are so easily impressed.

"They have enormous respect for the English here, it's extraordinary," says the British actor who plays Rupert Giles, resident expert on all things evil in the American high-school gothic show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, on TV3.

"I don't understand why," he says on the phone from California. "I think it's something to do with the fact they think it's intellectual to have an English accent. Little do they know. Kiwis know - that it's all a front."

New Zealanders may also be more likely to see the character of Giles - tweedy, woolly, cerebral but repressed in romance - as a stereotypical Hollywood take on the Englishman.

But there's more than that to the learned man who watches over Buffy and her friends in their fight to keep the forces of darkness at bay, says Head.

"They tend in the States to think of the English as a little two-dimensional, and one of the things that appealed to me was that Giles was fully fleshed and had a whole life going on even in the first episode."

Local viewers may also have recognised Head as the magician Adam Kraus in the first episode of the British whodunnit Jonathan Creek.

Head, who commutes between LA and his home where his partner and two daughters live outside the British city of Bath, says the success of Buffy meant the double act was unworkable and another actor took over as the magician. "Suddenly he magicked himself into someone else."

The role as Giles was a chance to get away from being typecast. "I tended to play smiling villains, then with the commercial (a series of soap-opera-style telly ads for coffee, which screened internationally) it became the romantic hero.

"I thought it would be a good idea to play someone who is about my age but is actually about 20 years older in his head. And I'm not like that, I'm actually quite a young 44."

Jaws have dropped, he claims, when the real Anthony Head walks through the door. "I'm fairly funky, I've worn an earring for some time and I'm into rock and roll and I'm a singer. I would say Giles is fairly close-minded and I'm pretty open-minded."

His open-mindedness encompasses the spirit realm of the demons and vampires which dog the life of Buffy, teenage saviour of the world.

"I believe strongly in the spirit world and in an afterlife in one form or another. So I don't find it too much of a push to represent what I have to [as Giles] as reality."

Head says playing the adult to a bunch of teenagers does "sometimes make me feel very old." But he takes exception to description of Buffy as a teen show.

The show's high-school setting is a convenient forum for the conflict of good drama, he says, and the teenage dilemmas and angst just the problems of the adult world thrown into sharp relief.

"All our fears, all our apprehensions, all our learning how to deal with each other, all our happiness is bunged into this body that's definitely trying to grow up. And to be honest, things don't change."

The show's popularity in the States, where it's become a cult hit, is also due to its adult, sardonic and witty humour, he says.

The second season of Buffy reaches a grand climax on screen in New Zealand this week. Now mid-way through filming season three, Head says the moment marks more change for Giles away from those British stereotypes.

"Enough happened to seriously muck with his mind. Not that I'd say he was a fruitcake. But basically I've sharpened him up.

"I've taken away some of the woollier side, the gentler side. Because it was my reasoning that when you are hurt to that degree you draw your tentacles in and present the world with a different face."

What: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Where: TV3
When: Friday, 9.30 pm
--Weekend TimeOut, 24/10/98