The Missing Lenk? by Tara Dilullo
Not anymore! Following in the footsteps of Buffy, Willow, Oz and Faith, Sunnydale alumni Andrew Wells paid a highly memorable visit to Team Angel in this season’s shocking ‘Damage’ episode, and provided an update on the whereabouts of the whole Scooby Gang! We caught up with actor Tom Lenk to discuss his time on Angel.

Hello, gentle readers! When we last visited our brave hero, Andrew Wells, the brash ally of Buffy the ‘Vampyre Slayer’ had vanquished the First Evil with his cunning mind and brilliant resourcefulness. With his incredible super-powers, he saved the world from ultimate evil, allowing the Slayer and her cohorts to live to fight another day!
    Okay, maybe that’s more along the lines of how Andrew would have liked the final climax of Buffy to turn out, but in reality his radical changes over the span of two seasons on Buffy was pretty stunning, too. Starting out as an uber-nerdy demonologist with a propensity for evil, he evolved into a redeemed uber-nerd and semi-Scooby member. To the shock of many, including actor Tom Lenk himself, Andrew gradually transitioned into one of the most memorable and well-loved supporting characters on the series. “I was convinced I was the least important of the Nerd Trio and would be the first to die,” Tom laughs, “But I eventually heard they wanted to keep me around and I realised after ‘Storyteller’ that if there was a time to go it would have been right then.”
    His instincts were right, and when we last saw Andrew on Buffy, he and the rest of the gang were standing on the outskirts of a destroyed Sunnydale left pondering their bright futures. In reality, Tom was sad to say goodbye to his new Buffy family, but he was thrilled to have been involved. “I felt lucky to be on the show at all. It was my first job and I started from nothing so I was just happy to be there. Of course, I was sad when it ended and I would have loved to be on it for another year but other people were ready to move on.  I was just so happy to be there for what I think was a television moment for this great cult show.”
    After the series finale, Tom jumped right into a variety of other projects on stage and screen. At the same time, Angel started production on its fifth season and the big buzz among fans and the press centred on which ex-Buffy characters would be making appearances on the show. Tom reveals he was wondering too. “I have friends over there on Angel like Drew Goddard and people I love like David Fury and Steve DeKnight from Buffy and I had my little shrine to Andrew – lighting candles in hope,” he grins. “No, I’m just kidding, but I thought ‘Wouldn’t it be cool?’ but then another part of me had to have a funeral for Buffy. That most awesome experience was now over and I was moving on, so I wasn’t setting myself up for disappointment even though I would have loved to be on Angel.”
    It turns out Tom didn’t have to worry about being disappointed because he got the call he was hoping for last November. The producers invited him to be the first Buffy character (not counting Spike or flashback-Drusilla) to appear on Angel after Buffy finished. “It was a pleasant surprise. Actually, I got the call that I was put on hold for the show and then Joss and his wife came to see me in a play I was doing at the time. After the play, he was like ‘So, I don’t know if you’ve heard…’ and I told him, ‘I heard’, and then I did a little dance that I will not do for you right now because it’s a little embarrassing,” he chuckles.
    Tom was most excited to see what the writers would come up with to explain what Andrew had been doing between the Buffy finale and his new appearance on Angel. “I have an over-active imagination and my wheels were spinning thinking Andrew is doing this and that, but I have to say I am a huge fan of where they took the character on Angel. I was just so happy to get to do the character again. It’s so fun being on a TV show. You get to keep creating and creating and adding more layers to your character.” He pauses and adds, laughing, “Although, I think I did get a little out of control with my creative shaping on this Angel episode. Yeah, I got a bit carried away.”
    The episode heralding Andrew’s return, ‘Damage’, was written by Drew Goddard and Steven DeKnight, “I’m a little obsessed with Drew Goddard,” Tom jokes. “He’s awesome. Drew told me that every episode the writers would say, ‘ We need to bring on somebody from Buffy‘ and he’d go, ‘How about Tom Lenk?’ He said he did it for every episode so I have to credit him and Joss for Andrew’s return. I love them both and I can’t say enough good things about them. I still  owe Drew Goddard and his lovely girlfriend a nice dinner.”
    ‘Damage’ finds Wesley calling Rupert Giles in London for his assistance in dealing with a newly-empowered but mentally unstable Slayer named Dana who escapes her hospital confines and sets out on a violent rampage in the city. Giles ends up sending his ‘top man’ to aid the gang in their search – new Watcher-in-training Andrew. That concept alone was enough to spur Tom’s imagination and creative juices into overdrive. He knew immediately Andrew would completely embrace his new position and homeland. “I assumed he came from London, but he doesn’t show up with bags or anything. I became a little obsessed with Andrew becoming British. He has no accent but he thinks he is British anyway.” he laughs. “I just wanted him to be like, ‘I’m British now. I’m cool.’”
    While he felt certain of how Andrew should appear on the show, Tom was actually nervous about how he would be welcomed by the Angel cast and crew. “It was sort of hard. It was good getting to come over but I was also trying new things and I had to remember they weren’t used to me. I had a comfort zone on Buffy. Any time you come into a new place you have to play your cards right, and hopefully I did okay.” He quickly adds that his fears were quickly put to rest by the Angel team. “Everyone there was so nice. They were really cool and the set was relaxed.”

Stepping back into Andrew’s skin after seven months was easy for Tom but as he alluded to before, he had some definite ideas on how to bring Andrew into the now. “I think the director wanted him to be very cool and very slick. As somebody who portrayed this character for two years, I didn’t think it would be very funny for him to be like that because then, where do we go with him if he is completely changed? I kept it so Andrew thinks he is good at what he does, but he is actually quite bad at it. Like when he was in  ‘Storyteller’ and imagining himself doing these grand things and even then he wasn’t quite entirely good at it. He is caught up in playing a part, like acting out his favourite scenes in Star Wars but it’s real life. I’m hoping it’s still funny, even though he’s gone on a bit of a journey.”
    Those changes also include a completely different physical look that Tom was key in developing. When Andrew is first revealed again, he is sporting a pipe, tweed suit and a surprisingly hilarious floppy haircut a la Doctor Who. “My hair is different now. I let it grow out and it might possibly look like a wig, but just know that it’s real and I’m not trying to look like a Hobbit,” he chuckles. “They have him in a suit because he is trying to play the part, but it’s not a very attractive suit. Yet again, it’s sort of half-ass and I insisted it wasn’t perfect because that’s just not funny. Characters must grow and go to different places but when they go to a place they can’t be funny, there is no going back. I also tried to incorporate glasses but they didn’t fit in, but maybe if I come back again, I can work them in.”
    And like his dry-erase boards and video camera on Buffy, Tom made sure props were part of Andrew’s repertoire on Angel. “I sort of panicked with that because the weekend before we shot the episode, I didn’t get to tell the prop people what I needed and it involved making things. I ended up making some props so I was up all night gluing and pasting and using markers and luckily, they made it into the shot” he slyly shares.
    While he loves adding those quirky elements to enhance his overall performance, he deeply respects the writers and uses them as his ultimate guide for Andrew. “They write for me what I’m good at doing. I try to add to it with props or silly costumes. I’m never quite satisfied so I’m always trying to make an ass out of myself even more.” As for improvising with the script, Tom purposefully keeps it to a minimum. “I try not to tinker with the lines until after I’ve said what they want. I did get carried away with one of the scenes and I was trying to make it funnier and it was supposed to be really serious and I was trying to find the balance. I was adamantly trying not to be as serious as the director wanted and we came to a compromise. Looking back at it now, I was being a bit crazy,” he laughs.
    Aside from revisiting his beloved character, Tom also got to spend time with old friends including James Marsters, who as Spike has always had an uneasy friendship with the former (?) geek. In ‘Damage’, Andrew emotionally welcomes back the vampire the Sunnydale gang thought was dusted and he clues Spike in on where the Scooby Gang landed. “It was really cool to hang out with James again. He is such a great guy and very funny. He is an actor’s actor and he is very into doing it. We had a big fight scene and we were walking around shipyards together. It was fun.”
    Tom also relished finally getting to act with an off-screen friend, Alexis Denisof. “The best part was getting to work with Alexis because I’m friends with him and Alyson Hannigan and we had such a good time. It was really nice to hang out with him because I had never worked with him before. Andrew is really judgemental of Wesley’s character in the episode. Wesley is like the Watcher that flunked out in his eyes and Andrew has a couple of moments when he gets to go after him. I literally couldn’t look at Alexis during those scenes because we would laugh. It was crazy.”
    A popular guest at Buffy and Angel events around the globe, Tom is just pleased and honoured that the fans have embraced his character so much and that the creative team of Mutant Enemy has kept Andrew alive to perhaps visit Angel again someday. “We had fun doing it and I think it was a one-time thing, but it would be so much fun to go back and play with the kids again.” He pauses, then adds with Andrew-inspired enthusiasm, “So, write your letters people!”

Lab Rat? by Tara Dilullo
Friend or foe? Goodie or baddie? The jury’s still out on Fred’s employee and potential love interest, Knox – although we may be in for some revelations very, very soon! We chat to actor Jonathan M. Woodward about his Angel role.

With Angel’s takeover of Wolfram & Hart this season, the gang has been dealing with a building full of evil employees, all potentially ready and willing to turn on their new bosses at any time. Team Angel has weeded out many of the worst and put fear into the rest, but there are a few that defy categorisation – one being Fred’s new right-hand man, Knox. The white-coated lab geek is seemingly Fred’s perfect match – a sweet-faced brainiac always ready to help when the situation is at its worst. Yet for all his good deeds, something has just got to be wrong with Mr. Perfect. Jonathan M. Woodward, who plays the scientist, admits, “I don’t get told and I like it that way. I think it was just really clear that he was supposed to be the nicest guy in the universe, which is a tip-off that he is probably going to be awful later, so I’ve been making him nice for now!”
    The Auburn, Maine native developed a love for acting at the young age of six, when he performed in local productions, but it wasn’t a career aspiration until later in life. “If I had known the ramifications of the decision to become an actor, I might have been too freaked out to make it,” he laughs. He eventually attended NYU for Experimental Theater. “It was entirely based on performance and performance theory. It was very non-traditional. It was great and I still work with them today.” Out of school, he pursued New York theatre, never intending to jump to television. “It was the East-coast mentality to shun TV. I ended up with an agent coming out of school and so I began auditioning. It was slow. It was probably three straight years of auditioning and I really didn’t know what I was doing. I did a commercial or two, but I was mostly doing plays with friends and working on a dance piece that we took on a tour to France and Italy. Eventually, I got booked for a film and that changed everything. It was such a gift.” That role was in Emma Thompson’s drama, Wit.
    A few years later he moved to Los Angeles, and television came calling. Astute viewers will recognise Jonathan as Holden Webster, the psych-student vamp in the Season Seven Buffy episode, ‘Conversations With Dead People’, His impressive stint in that episode then led to his casting in the unaired Firefly episode ‘The Message’. “They wrote  Tracey in Firefly with me in mind and they wrote Knox for me on Angel.” In that episode, ‘Home’, Knox gave Fred the tour of the Wolfram & Hart Science Division in hopes of tempting her to jump aboard. “When they called me up for the end of Season Four, it was hinted that I might come back in the next season,” Jonathan comments. “I was on set with Amy Acker and we were talking and she said, ‘If we come back, we may see you in September.”

    As Jonathan hoped, Knox has been back. “When the season got kicked off, they booked me for three episodes and they haven’t killed me off yet. I always operated on the assumption that if I wasn’t dead by the end of the episode, I would probably come back for one more so they could kill me,” he smiles.
    Jonathan says working on Angel has been great. “Everyone has his or her rhythm and I’m comfortable enough, finally and I don’t get nervous.” Due to his work on Buffy and Firefly, Jonathan has also got to work with some familiar faces on the crew. “Shawna Trpcic, the costume designer, worked on Firefly and then came over to Angel and so did Diane Acrey-Doyle from Hair, so when I showed up on Angel I knew both of those guys and that was very exciting. It was a nice feeling.”
    The steady work is a plus, too. “I like being recurring. I’ve never been a series regular. I was drawn to acting because it was always a different project and that’s important, but I’m rethinking that now because that’s not how the world works and I find TV fun. It’s nice to go to work every day and hone a character.”
    Knox’s presence has been low-key so far this season, with his appearances consisting mostly of science talk and a little bit of flirting between him and Fred, a storyline he is enjoying, too. “I dig Amy. She is the sweetest thing in the universe. Knox is completely in love with the girl. Otherwise, it’s been fun, quiet, lab stuff so far. It’s always lab coats for me,” he chuckles.
    As for the evil Knox that many are anticipating, Jonathan guesses he could be revealed soon. “I feel like something is going to be happening down the road because I come in and say, ‘Hi, I’m Knox’ and I look cute, so something interesting eventually has to happen. But, I’m much happier getting surprised like everyone else. Plus, if I did know, I wouldn’t want to unconsciously tip my hat.” Yet he leaves us with the enticing hint: “I believe my favourite episodes of Angel are coming. There are some really interesting episodes coming up for Knox…”