Young Gunn by Mike Stokes
For Season Two of Angel, Angel Investigations had a new member, one used to the mean-streets of Los Angeles. Now coming to the end of his first full year onboard, J. August Richards talked all about becoming a member of one of television’s biggest shows.

While the rest of the country was following the latest developments on the Square and the Street and mesmerised by the back-stabbing goings on behind the closed doors of the Big Brother household, the Los Angeles Times was following the real life of J. August Richards, the actor who plays Charles Gunn on Angel, in his own version of The Trueman Show.
    The newspaper’s view of reality television, however, was a little bit different. In fact, it was exploring how realistic it was for minorities to land choice roles on television at a time when it seemed like the networks existed on a decidedly vanilla landscape. As the only African American character sharing office space with a former Sunnydale Harvest Queen, an intellectual Brit, and an Irish vampire who’s run amok over the past couple of centuries, Richards credits the predominantly white Angel writing staff with developing Gunn’s streetwise attitude and authentic dialogue… with a little help.
    “When I change my lines, I just deliver them and wait for their reaction,” Richards says with a sly grin. “I just kind of riff sometimes and they’ll pull me back or they’ll just let it go. When they have a problem with it, they tell me. It’s not that I have to change much, because they usually get it right. The writers are really good. Some of the things you hear me saying that you might think I made up, they wrote. I’m glad they don’t dumb him down and make him say stupid things. He still speaks English and understands English.”
    It was Gunn’s actions that spoke much louder than his words, however, when he arrived on Angel‘s vampire-dusting scene in last season’s ‘War Zone’. When he staked his beloved sister, Alonna, after she became a vampire, it was immediately clear that this character was no lightweight. For Richards, who is also very close to his own sister, the scene definitely touched a nerve.
    “I thought about that moment in terms of my own sister and my own beliefs,” he says. “Gunn’s ultimate objective was to protect Alonna. The final act of protection was to protect her from herself by killing her. That’s what I love about that moment and that episode.”
    Dusting one’s own undead siblings tends to leave the type of emotional scar that makes one a natural for Whedon and Greenwalt’s Angelverse. Gunn’s act also shows the exact type of tragic heroism that led Richards from an occasional guest star credit to the more secure title of series regular – although no one is ever truly safe with demons hiding in every alley.
    It’s also a part that almost didn’t materialise for Richards, who was supposed to audition for another series while he was waiting to hear about Angel.
    “That morning I woke up and went to test for Angel. Then I was sitting in my apartment waiting to see if I got the part – if I did, I wouldn’t go to the next audition. But if I didn’t, I’d have to,” he recalls. “I couldn’t even look at the script for the next job, because I was so needing to know if I got the part on Angel. It was five minutes before the audition, I was sitting outside feeling kind of depressed like I hadn’t gotten it, and then just as I was getting out of the car, my manager called me up and told me I had gotten the part. I didn’t want to go to the other audition, because I was so attached to this character. I felt like auditioning for the second role would be to let Gunn go.”
    While Richards had never seen an episode of Buffy or Angel prior to his audition due to Tuesday night acting classes, he was suddenly a part of one of the hottest ensembles on television. Since the part on the series he walked away from never aired, Richards’ gamble paid off. He’s never been one to shy away from the path less taken, however, or to simply blaze his own trail. Richards was influenced less by calculus at school (“I was good at maths,” he smiles) and more by Sean Penn and Denzel Washington, so his spirit led him to the University of Southern California where he studied acting with some equally distinguished classmates, such as James Lesure from For Your Love and Kevin Mambo, who won two Emmys back-to-back for Guiding Light.

And now that Richards has dedicated himself to protecting the mean streets of Angel, he says working in the cut-throat entertainment industry helped him grasp the concept of the show quickly.
    “The show is taking the veil off the real LA, because there are some real vampires and demons walking around here,” Richards says. “They just don’t have masks and they can walk around in the sunlight. I think this show is a perfect analogy for what LA really is. I do love living in LA and enjoy the city, but vampires are all around. They’re people that drain the blood right out of you. They’re all around the planet, so it’s not hard for me to connect to what a vampire is.”
    Real-life vampires aside, Richards couldn’t be happier with the current success he is enjoying or the cast of characters he is sharing it with.
    “Everybody on the set is so fantastic and there are so many interesting people,” he says. “I absolutely love working with David Boreanaz, He’s so tight with his dramatic skills and his comedic skills – he juggles that line so well. Charisma Carpenter, I completely adore. She teaches me dances, choreographs dances, and we do them together between takes. She’s definitely one of my favourite people on set. And Alexis Denisof is a dynamic actor. He’s phenomenal. There’s a Tony or an Oscar in his future – you heard it here first.”
    At the end of the day, however, it’s the work that the actor seems to love the most, and it shows in his approach to Gunn.
    “I really love his spirit. He’s so pure and clean and unaffected,” Richards enthuses. “It’s just about protecting what you love, and I think anybody can connect to that. I love the extent to which he goes to protect the people he loves. I find that fascinating and admirable.”