Fred and Loving It! by Paul Simpson
It’s been a rollercoaster year for the Angel Investigations team, and especially for Winfred Burkle, a.k.a. Fred, the young scientist slowly coming out of her shell as she reaccustoms herself to life in this dimension. In Buffy Magazine #49, Amy Acker talked about Fred’s tangled love life during the fourth season, and now she tells Angel Magazine about the challenges that faced Fred as the year came to a close…

Amy Acker is still glowing. There’s no other word to describe the aura of happiness that is emanating from her as she sits in the interview room backstage at the Angel End of Days Convention. It’s not the convention itself that’s making her this happy – as she explains, she’s a little bit nervous about going on stage in front of the 3000 fans of the series who have flocked to Blackpool to see the stars – but the fact that she’s just come back from her honeymoon in Italy with her new husband James Carpinello.
    “It was hard to come back,” she admits with a smile. “Getting married was pretty much my only plan for the hiatus between seasons. It’s all been pretty amazing. We didn’t want to come back, and we’ve been saying that we’ll have to go back there.”
    However, Amy had no intention of letting her fans down, and missing the opportunity to share some of her stories about the most recent season of Angel. She agrees that it’s been an interesting year for all the cast, particularly given the massive left turn that the series has taken in the final episode of the season, as the Angel Investigations crew are offered the chance to take advantage of all the facilities belonging to their former arch-enemies, Wolfram & Hart. At the time we’re speaking, the final okay hadn’t been given by FOX and the WB Network for a further year, but all the cast were crossing their fingers that they would be renewed – as, of course, they have been.
    “I think it’s been a great year,” she says. “I mean we’ve all been really hoping there’s a fifth season because they just opened this brand new door. It wouldn’t be a totally different show, but in this new environment having this whole office and all of these resources, I think it would be really interesting.”
    Amy anticipates that the writers will concentrate on the dynamic of the team as they meet their new challenges. “Hopefully we’ll have a year to explore how the new set-up changes the relationships between the characters,” she explains. “We can find out just how being in this environment affects Wesley and me, Gunn and me, and Gunn and Wesley.”
    The move is also going to expand Fred’s horizons. “She hasn’t really met any other people since she left Pylea, other than the Angel Investigations people,” she points out, “so when you put her into this big office environment there’s tons more possibilities! I think if we go to Wolfram & Hart it’ll be a good chance for her to have a leadership role which Fred has never had as part of Angel Investigations. She’s always been part of the team, and when when she was on her own, she was looking for other people to come and help her. But if she’s in charge of a whole science division or whatever it is, then she just can’t wait for someone else. I’m sure there’s so many things that Joss and the writers can come up with. Which is why they’re so brilliant!” She gives me a little peal of laughter. “And we get to use this really neat set!”
    The actress found that the episodes towards the end of the year gave her the biggest challenge during the fourth season. “It was the episodes where I found out that Jasmine was not what we thought she was,” she recalls. “We were all kind of enraptured, put under the spell by her, and I had to convince everyone of that. I think that was probably the most fun and most challenging, because I hadn’t really had a two-episode arc where I wasn’t always in the scene with everyone else. Not only was it really tiring, but the challenge of trying to follow the character through two episodes and making the storyline and everything flow and keep it interesting was really great.”
    Often when two episodes are as tightly connected as ‘Shiny Happy People’ and ‘The Magic Bullet’, they are shot as ‘one’, with scenes from both episodes filmed concurrently. That wasn’t the case here – Amy hadn’t even seen the script for the later episodes when Fred began her  struggle against Jasmine. “They were two totally separate episodes,” she says. “When I did the first one I didn’t realise that my part in the second one was going to be as large as it was. I didn’t know what was going to happen except that everyone was going to be trying to kill me! I was on the run, which was great. Marita Grabiak directed the first one, and then Jeff Bell did ‘The Magic Bullet’ and we hadn’t worked with him as a director. It was really challenging and fun to have all that material to work with.”
    Certainly, there seems to be a new energy from the cast in those episodes, and a very different feel to the show after the darkness of The Beast arc. “We were all really tired,” Amy says, “but at the same time we were looking at the whole Jasmine arc, and everyone was wondering, ‘What is this? Is this going to work?’ We really couldn’t tell if it would or not. This is very different from anything we’ve ever done on the show!”
    That bemusement lasted until they saw the finished product. “We really didn’t know until we saw them if they were going to work,” Amy repeats, “and so when we saw them everyone seemed pretty pleasantly surprised. They were cool. Even my parents were saying, “We love Jasmine!’”
    While the Jasmine episodes challenged Amy the most, she had the most fun at the other end of the season when production upped sticks and went to Las Vegas for a few days to find out what happened to Lorne, the Host, when he went in search of fortune and glory on the Strip. “Filming in Las Vegas was pretty wonderful,” Amy laughs. “Being a ‘Lornette’ was exciting. I got to dress up, and we got to go to Las Vegas and run around on the streets! People were looking at me. I got a discount at McDonalds because they thought I was a real showgirl! That was my ‘beginning of the season’ highlight.”

    Although she’s keen to point out that she enjoyed the experience, it’s clear Amy wasn’t as keen on the middle part of the season, more for technical reasons than a dislike of the story. “The last few episodes were just great, but we had such a big group of us mid-year, as well as Faith, in that arc,” she explains. “There were four or five episodes where everyone was there. We were doing scenes with eight people in them, which are easy to watch, but when you’re filming them it takes a whole day to shoot one scene, and each person only has two lines! It’s great and a lot of fun to be with everyone, but you don’t get the chance to do as much acting as if it’s a two person scene. Switching from having a bunch of episodes like that to having those two episodes where I got to be on my own was good. I had my first fight but no one was there! Even though it was with a three foot tall man, I still won!”

The changes in tone during the year highlight for Amy the appeal of Angel. “There are really no boundaries,” she says. “We can have an episode one week that seems like a normal show and then the next week we’re back to anything-can-happen and there are no limitations. It’s not like The West Wing or a show where you’ve got these real people, and only this can happen or that can happen. It’s funny because a lot of times we’ll read the script and be saying to each other, “This is unbelievable, this would never happen’. So we go to the writers and then we realise, ‘Oh, wait, it’s being said by a green demon, so…!’ ‘Okay! It’s believable! Anything can work!’ But having said that, although these characters are in extraordinary circumstances, they are real people with real problems. They’re people who have insecurities. Even Angel has this major flaw that makes him real.”
    Amy doesn’t think that she herself would cope as well as Fred has if her life was turned upside down and she was thrown into another dimension, but she points out that, to a certain extent, that is exactly what did happen to her when she joined the series at the end of the second year. “This was my first real show, and I was just thrown into it,” she recalls. “Angel was a show that I heard so much about and my friends had watched in college. I was joining this cult classic show. I did get told to do this or do that. It made it interesting playing the character and experiencing a similar thing as the actor. I didn’t know about these people. So as Fred learned about Angel and about Willow and all these others who would come and visit, I would learn with her and we’d experience it together.”

   There’s a nice reminder of Fred’s naivety at the end of ‘Orpheus’. “I don’t think Fred knew that Willow liked girls,” Amy says wryly. “She was intrigued by her presence and her smart intelligence. I think that that was the joke at the end when Fred was all. ‘Yeah, and we should do this’ and Willow says, ‘I’m seeing someone.’ And then Fred realises what’s going on but she’s way over her head, and just says, ‘Oh, that’s cool!”
    With no official announcement of a renewal before the cast wrapped for the year, the actors returned to the grind of auditioning for work either for the summer, or possibly for a longer period. Amy admits honestly that she found this scary. “I would love to do a play or something this summer, and just any part that’s a little bit different,” she says. “But because I’ve been on the show for over two years, when I started auditioning again in the summer, I was like ‘I don’t know how to do this. I can only be Fred!’ It’s been fun just to go to auditions where you get to play new parts.”
    Amy would also like to expand her range onto the big screen. “I’d like to do some movies and maybe do the sort of character roles like Fred,” she says. “Most of my life until I started playing her, I’d been the teenager who’s sort of always the one who’s found crying! Being the quirky character on a show has been a lot of fun.”

Blast from the Past by Paul Simpson
Watch out! Holtz is about! He terrorised Angel for almost a whole season, and proved to be one of the most memorable villains in the show. Actor Keith Szarabajka discusses his Angel experiences.

Lights, Camera… Astin! by K. Stoddard Hayes
Forget the evils of Mordor – Lord of the Rings actor Sean Astin had to face nasty old Angelus himself when he directed Season Four episode ‘Soulless’! Sean discusses bringing the Big Bad back to the screen…