The Uncanny X-Man

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Official Magazine
April 2003
By Abbie Bernstein

Buffy may have all sorts of problems thrown at her every day, but it’s easy to forget that Xander does, too – and he doesn’t have Slayer powers to help him deal with them. Abbie Bernstein chats to actor Nicholas Brendon about his time on the show.

While it’s unwise to confuse actors with their characters – after all, the whole idea of acting is to pretend to be somebody you’re not – it’s easy to imagine that Xander Harris, the most normal member of the Scooby Gang, would thoroughly approve of Nicholas Brendon’s approach to bringing him to life each week on Buffy. Nicholas says he takes each scene as it comes. “As an actor, whatever is given to me, I try to do to the best of my ability.”

This directness applies whether Xander is throwing out his customary quips, wretchedly confessing his most shameless self-doubts in “Hell’s Bells,” or bursting into song and dance in “Once More, With Feeling.”

“You do it,” Nicholas says plainly. “Don’t overthink stuff. That’s my motto in life – don’t overthink, because it’ll screw you up, every time.”

A native of Los Angeles, California, Nicholas came to professional acting relatively late. “I wanted to be a baseball player,” he recalls. A severe arm injury curtailed this ambition, so he set his sights elsewhere.

“I got into acting when I was about 25. I started when I was about 21, because I had a stutter, and so I wanted to challenge myself.” Acting class helped him address his difficulty in speaking – Nicholas was given “eight or nine tongue-twisters” as verbal exercises. “It worked out well for me.”

In fact, it has worked out so well that Nicholas has quite literally become the poster figure for the Stuttering Foundation of America. “For the third year in a row, I’m their spokesperson. It’s an honor.”

Along with ease of speech, acting class also proved to Nicholas that he wanted to perform. He landed a few commercials early on, along with guest shots in the comedies Married… With Children and Dave’s World. On-stage, he starred in Los Angeles-area productions including The Further Adventures of Tom Sawyer, My Own Private Hollywood and Out of Gas at Lover’s Leap.

Meanwhile, Nicholas contemplated studying medicine and supplemented his income as a production assistant, a plumber’s assistant, a veterinary janitor, waiter, delivery man and in one other field that has come in handy over the last few years when Xander needs to look realistic on the job: “I’ve done some carpentry back in my day,” Nicholas reveals, “and I’ve got friends who’ve done it, so I know enough about it to make it somewhat real. I couldn’t build a house, but I could build a closet.”

Then came the fateful audition for a series on a fledgling network with an odd-sounding title. Buffy the Vampire Slayer turned out to be one of the best-regarded TV shows of its era and Xander continues to be a goldmine of a part, but Nicholas admits that, in the beginning, things like quality and character growth were secondary to the fact of simply being a series regular.

“Buffy was the first time I booked, really, so I wasn’t too particular. I was lucky enough to be hired and to be doing the show.”

Seven years later, Nicholas still feels lucky to be doing Buffy. “I’m jazzed to be part of the cast.”

Like Xander, Nicholas is willing to venture into the unknown with his friends, though in his case, he didn’t risk life and limb but rather singing and dancing in the musical episode “Once More, With Feeling.”

“I didn’t have a very good time,” he jokes. “No, I had a great time doing it! In all honesty, it changed my life a little bit. I didn’t do any musical theater when I was growing up. So when I went into this musical, I wasn’t terrified. I went into acting and I didn’t know what I was doing and then I hooked this show, so my thing was, when Joss said, ‘We’re doing a musical,’ I’m like, ‘Cool. I’ve got nothing to prove. I’m not a singer or dancer – whatever I do is better than what I haven’t done.’ It’s funny, when we were doing this episode – sometimes you have to get up at five o’clock in the morning when the alarm goes off, it’s a hard wake-up, and then you snooze a lot. But with this episode, I would bounce out of bed. I loved going to the studio and singing. I’d sing for two hours and my voice went away after a few sessions and then working on the dancing and then having it all come together – I had the best time of my life, just a blast.”

Being directed by Joss Whedon is always a pleasure in any case, Nicholas points out: “He just knows exactly what he wants, so we’re not doing any extra coverage. He knows exactly where the shot’s going to go, why it’s going to go that way. Everything’s very succinct. [Marti is] similar.”

The soundtrack for “Once More, With Feeling” is out on CD and has hit the charts. The notion that Nicholas – along with his Buffy castmates – has an album out hasn’t entirely sunk in so far, he acknowledges: “I haven’t thought about that yet … it’s kind of cool!” He even posed for the reference photos used by artist Adam Hughes to create the paintings of characters used on the CD cover: “Joss actually took pictures with his camera.”

Nicholas says he usually learns what’s in store for Xander on a script-by-script basis. He doesn’t make suggestions to the writers as to what he thinks Xander ought to do next. “I don’t do that. Why? [The writers] do such a good job.”

As an actor, Nicholas tries not to overprepare for the big emotional moments, which Xander had plenty of in Season Six – the “Hell’s Bells,” terror of becoming his father and subsequent anguished separation from Anya, the gut-wrenching disgust of finding out that both Anya and Buffy had slept with Spike in “Entropy,” and the soul-bearing tenderness he displays toward the apocalyptic Willow in “Grave” are all cases in point. “Whatever they give me, I’ll do. But yeah, as a character, it was nice to be doing that.”

“Grave” stands out as a particular favorite: “I saved the world! I saved the world!” Nicholas chants playfully. “The great part about that [yellow crayon] monologue was the fact that, just as an actor – after I read it, I cried. And if I’m crying reading it the first time, and then I work with it, when it affects [the actor] that way, when you see it – thank you [Joss Whedon] very much for doing that. If I can in a nutshell break down last season, I’m going to say ‘Yellow Crayola crayon!’”

Season Six of Buffy got a fair amount of press for its occasional nudity. Nicholas got to wear pajamas when Xander was seen in bed with Anya, but this didn’t prevent him from being in scenes when other actors were unclothed.

“It threw us,” Nicholas admits. “I had to walk in on a scene [in “Gone”] where James was having sex with invisible Sarah/Buffy. I go to say ‘Spike’ … “ Nicholas’ first instinct was to make the situation less awkward for James, which was at odds with Xander’s attitude in the scene. “[Talking to] my buddy, it’s like,” Nicholas adopts a completely relaxed tone, “Dude – oh, right, you’re Spike.” His voice at once becomes hostile. “Hey, what’re you doing? God, that’s disgusting!”

Not only has Xander been allowed to remain fully dressed so far this season, but his apparel has also changed to some extent, with Hawaiian shirts giving way to the occasional business suit. “A little bit, yeah,” Nicholas smiles. “They’re still trying to figure that out – they’re never going to figure my wardrobe out. But you know, that’s the thing with Xander – he doesn’t really have a wardrobe, so it’s nice, it’s funny that people talk about it, but it’s nice to keep people on their toes a little bit.”

During his time on Buffy, Nicholas has co-starred in two feature films, Psycho Beach Party and Pinata, the latter featuring Nicholas’ now-wife, actress Tressa DiFiglia (who, in a six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-like bit of casting, appears with Nicholas’ erstwhile Buffy co-star Amber Benson in director/writer/producer/star Amber’s feature film Chance). Although “Psycho Beach Party was more campy,” Nicholas notes, it has slasher-film elements, while Pinata is straight-out horror and Buffy is, well, full of vampires and other monsters. Nicholas says he doesn’t have a particular attraction to horror as an actor, however. “That’s what came along. I mean, horror movies scared me.”

Like everyone else involved in Buffy, Nicholas doesn’t know what the future holds for the show, though he is contracted for an eighth season should the series proceed. Meanwhile, he continues to balance his original instincts as a performer with what he’s learned over seven years working on a bona fide hit: “My take on acting is that I always wanted to [maintain] my feelings and my process of when I first booked this show. I was very innocent, so I always try to keep that kid-like innocence in my acting. Obviously, it changed with success, but I try to keep it simple. Success is fantastic – I try to build on that and still keep it very simple.”