Street Preacher by Paul Simpson
Caleb, Season Seven’s girl-hating, evil-loving preacher, was one of the nastiest villains that Buffy has ever faced, but his alter-ego, Nathan Fillion, couldn’t be more different. Buffy Magazine caught up with the talented actor at the recent Fusion convention, to find out about working with Joss Whedon, being killed by Buffy and bringing Firefly to the big screen…

“What’s the use of knowing Joss Whedon if he’s not going to let me play a villain?”
    Nathan Fillion grins as he sits backstage at the Starfury Fusion event in Blackpool, thinking back over the discussions that arose when his name came up in the casting process for Caleb, the oh-so-charming villain who faced the Slayer in her final few episodes. Nathan has been a great hit at the convention, and even though he’s only got a short time for lunch, he graciously agrees to sit down with Buffy Magazine and discuss his work.
    Nathan initially met Joss Whedon because he had “a holding deal with Twentieth Century Fox. I had done a sitcom for ABC that was produced by FOX,” he explains, “and they said that they didn’t have a job for me just yet, but they’d like me to be in their employ. They set me up with a couple of meetings with some writers, and one of them was Joss. He had a treatment – not even a full script, but just a play-by-day of what Firefly was going to be. And it was brilliant. I had so many questions. I went to this little meeting with Joss and he painted a picture for me that I was in awe of. He left no stone unturned when considering stories. He paints in layers. After we had that first meeting, we chatted not only about the programme, but also about how we liked to work. We seemed to get along very well.”
    Nathan was also impressed by the thought that Whedon had put into the character of Malcolm Reynolds, the Captain of the Serenity, whom he was to portray. “I didn’t have any ideas that I thought might work better or be better,” Nathan admits. “I was in love with the character. It’s dangerous to fall in love with a character or a project, because if something goes wrong, you’re broken-hearted. But I was absolutely in love, and all I wanted was to do that character that I painted justice. I don’t consider myself an extremely clever man in terms of knowing what something needs. Joss is the guy for that. That’s not my strength – my strength is in acting, seeing the script and those lines, and trying to make the character breathe on screen.”
    Both Mal Reynolds, and later Caleb, are characters far removed from the extremely cheerful Nathan. “I was so surprised when I got the part of Mal,” he says, “because it’s so not me. I’m a happy guy. I’ve had a very easy life. I was raised by happy, loving parents who were in love with each other, and put us, as children, first. Mal is so broken, so hollow and so bitter and it’s so alien to what I understand – but I enjoyed playing the departure. I was able to live in a fantasy world every day. Normally you don’t walk around thinking with your fists and shooting people in the face, but there’s a dark corner that always wants to. That television show allowed me to live those little fantasy moments of that cowboy daring. I was able to do the three things I wanted to do as an actor – shoot a gun, get shot by a gun and ride a horse.”
    Sadly the axe fell on Firefly after only 14 episodes had been made, leaving Nathan out of work. “Then Joss called me up and said, ‘Hey, I got this character on Buffy’,” he recalls. “Of course I would! Everyone was telling him to cast me, but he resisted the idea because he’d already cast Gina Torres for Angel and he was afraid of what the people on the internet would say. I said, “To Hell with them!’ We had a meeting, rather than an audition, where we sat down and he talked about what he wanted the character to be. I started running scenes in front of him, and we’d make things creepier.”
    Nathan admires Whedon’s ability to write very cleanly. “Caleb didn’t have to be grand,” he explains. “Caleb didn’t have to act evil. He acted pleasant. He started off completely pleasant, and stayed completely pleasant throughout. Everything he said was rather pleasant… but with this creepy twist that was unsettling. He was like Ted Bundy with his charm. He was quite unassuming, quite charming and quite inviting. He had the confidence and belief he was right and there’s nothing more dangerous than a zealot!”

    The actor loved Caleb’s dramatic exit. “I always wanted to be the fellow who got killed and came back,” he says,” just to make you go, ‘Oh no, he’s one of those guys who can’t be killed’. But for Buffy to make it as final as she did, I thought that was befitting. We don’t often see Caleb angry. We hear about his anger and about his terrible temper, but we didn’t actually get to see it. We see him start to lose it a little bit, and then The First would calm him, but at the end when she kills him, that’s just too much. Then he started getting angry, but didn’t get a chance to have that righteous wrath.”
    Nathan enjoyed working on both series. “On Firefly, I knew everybody from the beginning, so I had a much more intimate relationship with everybody, which was great,” he points out. “Everybody was great on Buffy as well, but I just didn’t know so many people. Some of the crew members had been on Firefly. It was nice to have them around, and also nice to make new friends and meet these people who had been having this great time for seven years. They were all very tight as well – they ran a very tight ship and knew exactly what they were doing, and were having fun doing it. The only difference between the two shows was that on Firefly, it was like having a party at my house with my friends, and on Buffy it was like having a friend take me over to their house where there’s a party. I don’t know anybody, but it’s still fun.”
    When Firefly was cancelled, it was clear from everything that Joss Whedon was saying that he wasn’t going to let the crew of Serenity simply disappear into television folklore. “He said that he wasn’t going to let it die,” Nathan says, “and we all had hopes that it would return. But having had the rug pulled out from underneath you – that really kicked that hope around. But as it continued as things moved on, and a film started getting more and more likely, and the stakes kept getting higher and higher, you can’t help but hope. I didn’t want to think about it, but I was thinking that I really hoped it would. And here we are at the start of May, less than a month away from shooting the movie.”
    Nathan hopes the revelations about Malcolm Reynolds will continue. “When you saw him at the start of the series, he was a cold, broken man, who didn’t care about anything except himself, his ship and his crew,” he says. “But we learned as time went on that he was not just this shell. There is something inside him that is good, but you really have to dig to find it. In the movie, he’s still a smartass and he’ll still take cheap shots, but he gets dark. All my favourite things about that character are all in the movie. We’re allowed to do things that we weren’t allowed to do on TV – I get to swear, which I think is really a step up for Mal.”
    The actor wishes he was in a position to pick and choose between scripts, but, as he says, “I’m an actor. I go in for auditions even though I’m not really right for the role, hoping to at least make an impression on a casting director so that they might consider me for something else. But in an ideal world, I would look for characters to play that I like to see. I’m a big fan of the Indiana Jones type of character, in fact, all the sorts of roles that Harrison Ford has played! I’d look for something that I can say, ‘I know what to do with this role. I can make this role live and breathe.’ That’s my aim – to find something that I can really bring to life.”