Father Figure by Tara DiLullo
We’ve met a lot of Team Angel’s family members, but never one of Wesley’s – until the seventh episode of Season Five.. And it was worth the wait! Actor Roy Dotrice talks to Tara DiLullo about his Angel experience.

As a former demon hunter and leader of Angel Investigations, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce has had to face some pretty terrifying foes. Yet with years of apocalypse and demon-vanquishing under his belt even he was unprepared when confronted with his worst nightmare this season – a visit from his dad. While Wesley’s father has been alluded to in previous episodes and their less-than-amicable relationship is well documented, Roger Wyndam-Pryce hasn’t made an appearance until now. ‘Lineage’ sees Mr. Wyndam-Pryce Sr., show up at Wolfram & Hart looking to possibly reinstate his disappointment of a s son back into the rebuilding Council of Watchers.
    When casting, the Angel producers knew precisely where to go to find the man imposing enough to make even Wesley buckle under his glare – the venerable actor Roy Dotrice. His face is one that is instantly recognisable to fans of sci-fi genre television considering his many appearances in shows like Babylon 5, Hercules, Sliders and his most famous role of ‘Father’ in Beauty and the Beast.
    An actor for more than half a century, Roy’s path to his profession itself sounds like something out of a movie. “It was destiny,” he explains. “My home was in the Channel Islands just off the coast of France. I was there for the German occupation, a group of us got on a fishing boat and escaped and we arrived three days later in England. I tried to get into the Royal Airforce and they told me to come back when I was older. But I was able to put my age on and get in. I flew with them for two-and-a-a-half-years and got shot down and become a prisoner of war. We had a lot of actors in our camp and the only entertainment was what we made for ourselves. We did small productions and because I was so young, I was roped into playing the female parts. Eventually, I did graduate to male parts for which my wife has never ceased to be grateful,” he laughs. Upon being released from the camp, Roy returned to England where he did 13 years of repertory theatre in over 500 different parts and directed over 300 plays at the Manchester Rep. Company. His esteemed career has only grown since then, earning him critical praise in hundreds of other roles in stage, films and television.
    When the part of Roger Wyndam-Pryce came across his desk, Roy was intrigued. “I don’t read a lot of science fiction or fantasy and I hadn’t seen the show before, but I thought it was a very interesting role,” he shares. He accepted the part and showed up on set ready to dive into the complicated father/son relationship. “It was fairly easy because, obviously, Wesley’s relationship with his father was a strained one. His father was never lovey-dovey and quite stern with him. His attitude was one of criticism. I was never very nice to him when I met him. I just had to stand back and be analytical and critical of him, which was easy to play.”
    Roy was also pleased by the fact the writers made Roger more than just a one-note role. “I did like the way they inserted that softer side. It made the character more convincing. He was very human like when he says, ‘“’Have you told the girl you love her?’ That was the best scene for me because it showed an attraction and sympathy towards the son. It was the most real part of it.”
    Having never worked on the show before, Roy was delighted with his experience. “The nice thing about working on Angel is that a lot of the people on the show have a theatre background, which is fascinating. Amy Acker was sweet and the other actors were quite wonderful too. I thought the director, Jefferson Kibbee, was awfully good. He was an actor’s director in that he trusted the actors. I thought he was great and I liked working with him. It was an easy job to do because everybody knew what they were doing, which made it easy for me to fit in.”
    Roy holds particular praise for his co-star Alexis Denisof. “I had nearly all my scenes with Alexis. He is a theatre actor, trained in England and he was very English. We sat for hours just talking about English theatre and telling stories from the past. He was also great because whenever I had a question, he would explain the back-story to me. He was a delightful man. I really enjoyed his company.”
    For the climatic face-off in the last act, Roy was excited to participate in a full-out action scene. “I love working on location because it inspires you to another level of performance. We were on a rooftop and it was quite wonderful actually. It was late at night and we were on top of a skyscraper and there were skyscrapers all around us. It was magical. They had something like a hot air balloon that went about 50 feet in the air and lit the whole set. It was like a vast moon hanging over the skyscraper. It was a neat idea. I hadn’t seen it before but it worked awfully well because it had a natural moonlight look.”
    Roy will next be seen in the mini-series La Femme Musketeer with Gerald Depardieu and Michael York in 2004. But considering the twist in the final act of ‘Lineage’, the door is certainly open for Roger to make a comeback in Wesley’s life. “I’d love to do that and that would be a great episode to explore that relationship,” Roy enthuses. “I’d love to see what they do together and if they will ever get together with empathy.” With a twinkle in his eye, he adds, “I just hope that he does appear in the flesh someday.”

Legally Blonde by Ian Spelling
Harmony’s been through some pretty interesting life changes – bitchy schoolgirl, vampire, Big Bad (?) – and she’s currently settling nicely into her new job as Angel’s ditzy P.A. But one thing’s stayed the same – the character has always been good for a laugh. Actress Mercedes McNab talks about the life and times of Harmony Kendall…

The producers of Angel know a good thing when they see it, and so Mercedes McNab is sticking around as Harmony. “I know for a fact that I’m going to be in 17 out of the 22 episodes this season,” says the actress, who initially signed on for six episodes. “I think I’m going to be in every episode from here on out except for one. All those mean faces on set are saying to me now, ‘Oh, we knew all the time’ and I’m like, ‘Well, couldn’t you have told me?! Why were you keeping me in so much suspense?!’” Everybody but me seemed to know about it. It was really strange. When the show premiered this season, we were at The Grove in L.A. It was a meet-the-fans kind of thing and we did some interviews too, with news crews that came by. But one of the sound guys was there and he said, ‘Hey, remember me? I used to be on Buffy. I hear you’re doing 17 episodes this year!’ I was thinking, ’17, 17, 17!’ And I just kept trying really hard not to think about it. God forbid I got my hopes up and I then in fact did six and then they killed me. But it was just really funny and weird that this 17 number kept coming up. I just kept saying, ‘It’s really weird, but I’m not going to think about it.’”
    Back when series creator Joss Whedon was just getting Buffy the Vampire Slayer off the ground, Mercedes was among the many young actresses who read for the lead role that eventually went to Sarah Michelle Gellar. Joss obviously liked what he saw in Mercedes, as he hired her to play a character called Harmony Kendall in the first Buffy pilot. The pilot was ultimately scrapped, and Mercedes did not appear in the second one, ‘Welcome to the Hellmouth’. Harmony, however, officially popped up for the first time in the second Buffy episode ‘The Harvest’. Mercedes assumed it was her first and last time on the show, but to her good fortune, she was wrong. The writers kept writing for Harmony, as the character befriended and clung to Cordelia. Mercedes realised that there probably wasn’t enough room on Buffy for two resident bitches, so she dumbed Harmony down a notch or two, making her funny in an entirely different way from the snarky Cordelia.
    Harmony seemed to bite the dust in Buffy‘s third-season capper ‘Graduation Day’, but apparently she was only bitten. That’s to say that starting with Season Four’s ‘The Harsh Light of Day’, it was revealed that she’d been transformed into a vampire, which meant ditching Cordy and company as friends, revealing a dark side and even getting hot and heavy for a time with Spike. Mercedes made her final appearance on Buffy in the episode entitled ‘Crush’, which put a stake in the Harmony-Spike affair. A few months later, Harmony made her presence felt in Los Angeles, raising a little hell in the second season Angel episode ‘Disharmony’. And that was it for Mercedes and Harmony – until Whedon touched based with Mercedes following the announcement that Buffy would call it a day following its seventh year. Mercedes figured that he was calling to invite her to the Buffy Wrap Party, but he was, in fact, phoning to praise her efforts as an actress and to ask her to play Harmony as a recurring character over on Angel, assuming that someone – the WB, UPN, anyone really – picked up the show for a fifth season. The WB did indeed renew Angel, and Mercedes came on board as, of all things, Angel’s coffee-serving new secretary. And six episodes became 17. And recurring ultimately became regular.
    “It’s working out even better than I expected, actually,” Mercedes says. “The work has been pretty steady and it’s been interesting. They’ve given me a lot to do. The episode ‘Harm’s Way’ was great because it was basically all about Harmony. It was actually a stand-alone episode, but things are definitely heading in the direction of Harmony having more to do, of her being a part of the group. They’re focussing a little bit on Harmony and her issues, which is good, because everyone else has already been established. It’s nice to finally have that part of my character fleshed out a little bit. So things are going well so far.
    “Lorne and Harmony seem to have a pretty good friendship going,” Mercedes continues. “They seem to get each other and they don’t take everything so seriously, the way everybody else does. Fred and Harmony, I think, are starting to develop a friendship, the kind you see between girls. That’s good because I don’t think either one of them has any other female friends around them. Gunn and Harmony don’t really have a whole lot of a relationship going on. There has not been anything developed yet between them. I think that Angel is beginning to trust Harmony at this point. I think he realises that Harmony isn’t going to suddenly go off the deep end at any given moment. But he’s still going to be the hardest one to get through to because he’s just still not sure why she’s there or what to make of her. And she and Spike are sort of still at their same impasse. She was under a spell in ‘Destiny’ so you can’t blame her for being so upset. The sex scene in that episode wasn’t all that long, but all I know it that it was on the table and the next day I had bruises all up and down my back. I was like, ‘Well, this is fun. I got all these bruises for no satisfaction!’ After ‘Harm’s Way’ it kind of died down a little bit. They didn’t quite give me the next week off or an episode off, but the show after that dealt with a completely different situation. It went back to things we were dealing with before my episode. ‘Harm’s Way’ really didn’t have anything to do with anything. It was by itself. And after that it goes back pretty much to what I’d been doing before, what I’d been normally dealing with in the office and what-not.”
    Mercedes doesn’t pretend to be a writer, but if she were she’s got a few ideas that she’d put down on paper. Instead, she’ll voice them now and hope they somehow reach the Angel writing staff. “I always think it would be fun to give her more to do at the office, to let her be more of a part of the gang,” she notes. “Gunn is doing all the law stuff and Angel is kind of the street team and Fred is in the lab doing the science stuff. So I’ve always thought it would be funny and fitting for Harmony to be an undercover agent and have her to do whatever crazy thing she needs to do to get information out of people. It could be like Charlie’s Angels, but not campy like that. I think it would be funny to see Harmony imitate people or do whatever she’d need to do. Whatever the writers come up with would be great, because I just don’t want to see Harmony sitting at her desk all day answering phones. I’d also like to see a romantic relationship develop between her and someone, but I don’t know exactly who that would be.”

As busy as she is with Angel these days and as proud as she is with her accomplishments playing Harmony, Mercedes doesn’t want to be thought of as a one-trick pony. Following her departure in ‘Crush’, she guest-starred in an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger. After ‘Disharmony’, Mercedes displayed her versatility by appearing on Dawson’s Creek and Boston Public. Somewhere in between, she acted in the made-for-television movie Beer Money. “The other work is very important to me,” Mercedes acknowledges. “People can do steady work on a television show, but then you’ll see them pop up in a movie. Everybody wants to show what else they can do and wants to challenge themselves as actors. The role that I did on Dawson’s Creek, a young mother going out with a petty criminal who tried to mug Joey, was really challenging for me. It was completely different from anything I’d ever done and I felt like I had to prove myself as an actress. People wouldn’t necessarily perceive me being in that role because of the way I look, so I had to really act the hell out of it so that people would stop thinking, ‘Wow, this girl doesn’t look the part,’ and would start thinking, ‘Well, she sounds the part and feels the part.’”
    Mercedes is actually juggling another part even as she toils away on Angel. She had five days off in a row and promptly got a call with an offer to guest on another WB series, the freshman Joey Lawrence sitcom, Run of the House. “They said, ‘Are you busy this week? We want you to do the show. And upon your availability, it will also be a recurring role,’” Mercedes recalls. “So that will be pretty interesting, if I can pull off two roles at the same time. The show itself is about two sisters and two brothers who all live in a house together. The parents aren’t around, so it’s basically all the kids. I am the oldest daughter’s best friend. In my first episode my friend and I have our ‘first date’ as we call it, because we’ve lost all our friends to marriages and pregnancies and stuff like that. We’re not on that level, so we go out together and become friends.
    “Doing a sitcom is just completely different,” says Mercedes. “I like their shooting schedule a lot more than ours. You go in every day, but you only rehearse every scene a couple of times. You go in at nine and then you get to leave by two, so there’s a lot of playtime left in your day. You get to see people and talk to them during the day. Sitcoms are unbelievable. There’s a totally different style of acting on a sitcom versus an hour show. Everything is so very different, but it’s fun. Doing both shows is pretty tiring, but it’s exciting.”
    So tiring is juggling both shows that Mercedes, who raced home following a relatively short day on the Angel set in order to do this interview, must bid adieu in a moment and settle in for a nap. Before she puts down her phone, however, the actress addresses the possibility of her returning to Angel next season. Mercedes jokes that she needs to track down the sound guy who told her she’d be appearing in seventeen episodes this year. “I’ve got to find him again, wherever he is, and say, ‘Hey, am I going to be back on the show next season?’” Mercedes says. “Honestly, I try not to get too far ahead of the game. I’m just doing what I can right now and that’s all I can pretty much handle.”

Unleashing Angel by Ian Spelling
We’re already almost halfway through Angel Season Five, so we thought it was about time we caught up with Angel executive producer Jeffrey Bell again, to find out the latest scoops…

Angel Case Files: Winifred Burkle, AKA Fred

Angel’s Angels by Kate Anderson
With his drop-dead good looks, Angel’s never been short of admirers. Sadly, his track record in the love and romance department has seen better days. So, we’ve decided to take things into our own hands and play matchmaker – setting Angel up with the ladies in his life – to find out who we think is Angel’s perfect match!