Army Men by Matt Springer
A joint interview with actors Leonard Roberts and Bailey Chase, who starred as Riley Finn’s Initiative comrades, Forrest Gates and Graham Miller.

The life of a soldier in the Initiative is pretty rough. For one thing, there’s all the drunken college parties necessary to maintain their cover as a mild-mannered group of college guys. Then there’s all the buxom young co-eds populating those parties – no flag-loving military man would want to make them feel anything less than completely welcome. And of course, there’s the pressure of filling up their exhausting days playing basketball in their dorm rooms, a challenge to Special Agent Forrest Gates.
    “I cannot play basketball. It’s crazy,” confesses Leonard Roberts, who ironically got his big break in Spike Lee’s basketball film He Got Game. “We had an episode where Marc Blucas and I were shooting Nerf ball in his frat room. Marc’s supposed to shoot and miss, then Leonard’s supposed to shoot and make it. Marc shoots, sinks it – Leonard shoots, bricks it. It was sad. Finally, I was just popping them off. I think two out of twelve made it. It was a humbling experience.”
    Life in the military isn’t all fun and games, though. There’s the more serious issue of injuries to consider, whether at the hands of vicious demons or your frisbee-hurling compadres. “The first day of shooting that Leonard and I worked, Marc and I were throwing a frisbee across the room,” Bailey Chase recalls. “Marc and I were throwing it back and forth, and Leonard was sitting on the couch with his back to me, talking to Marc the whole time. There were a couple of times when Leonard got popped in the back of the head with a frisbee. We’d nail it – we’d always be totally flawless on the rehearsals. And then I’d pop Leonard.”
    Okay. So they’re not the most coordinated pair of hunks in the world. That’s why it’s called ‘acting’ and not ‘reality’. Whatever their athletic abilities, Roberts and Chase both proved throughout the season that they were up to the challenge of portraying two dedicated soldiers caught between their devotion to duty and the questionable practices of the Initiative.
    As Forrest, Roberts was the budding career soldier, refusing to believe the speculations about the true nature of the Initiative. He remained with the top-secret organisation through Maggie Walsh’s betrayal, bitterly disagreeing with Riley’s choice to betray his army roots and ally himself with the Slayer. After his untimely death at Adam’s hands, he again returned to the Initiative, this time to become a twisted demon-humanoid creation devoted to evil.
    Forrest was definitely a military man through and through, placing loyalty to his duty over all other concerns. It’s not surprising, then, that Roberts was able to convincingly convey that loyalty, considering that he himself at one time contemplated a military career.
    “My mom was a marine,” explains Roberts. “We talked about it for a while, that I’d go into the Marine Corps and go to college on the GI Bill. Then I was in high school right around the time of the Gulf War. There’s nothing like a war to really heighten your perspective of what you really want to do in the Armed Forces. I thought maybe I should think it through a little bit, try to go to college, and my mom respected that.”

In contrast to Forrest, Graham was able to embrace some of Riley’s doubts regarding the Initiative. He had a far more open mind to conflicting ideas about the top-secret organisation, and thus never viewed Buffy as the threat she seemed to pose to other Initiative operatives. If anything, his loyalty seemed more informed than Forrest’s. He fought in the final battle against Adam, and lives to fight another day.
    “For the audition, we didn’t get a script for the episode, so we didn’t know it was going to be military,” says Chase. “The character breakdown I got was that Graham was a ‘muscley mountain of a college senior,’ friend of Riley. When I read that, I was cracking up. I didn’t research or watch any army films or anything. Joss Whedon was hands-on in the first episode Leonard and I did and, if anything, they wanted us to shy away from the very structured, military regimen. When we weren’t in our uniforms, we tried  to be pretty normal guys.”
    It’s probably pretty hard to be ‘normal guys’ when you live above a cavernous base full of doohickeys and gadgets. “We had this running joke, me and the other guys,” says Roberts. “When we saw how elaborate the entire Initiative set was, it was like Bruce Wayne mode, and then Batman mode. We’d go down the elevator, and everyone talked a little deeper and looked a bit more stern.”
    The Initiative operatives were hardly average military guys, which required a greater leap of imagination than suiting up for a World War II drama. “To really appreciate the show, you need to step into the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and just accept that reality,” explains Chase. “Once you do that, it’s great, because the writing’s strong, and everybody does their job very well. That’s what makes the show fun.”

While Graham is still a fully-fledged member of the Initiative, Forrest has joined the ranks of the dearly departed. He’s probably playing Nerf ball in some other-worldly realm with Jenny Calendar and Larry the football player. On the other hand, he could find himself miraculously resurrected someday. If there’s one thing we know about Sunnydale, it’s that where death is involved, anything is possible.
    “I actually thought I was gonna get killed the next episode,” confesses Roberts. “Then people started to let me know that once you get started, you never really know what your future’s gonna be. Everyone can come back – you really never know with this show.”