Joss Whedon: The Biography (32 page)

Minear pitched his idea for the episode without knowing that over on
Buffy
, the writers had already broken the story that would air the
same night—about another vampire, James Marsters’s Spike. The character had lost the ability to feed on humans the previous season thanks to government experiments, and season five would find him struggling with unwanted romantic feelings for his enemy Buffy. Like “Darla,”
Buffy
’s “Fool for Love” would compare Spike’s current situation to his century-long history of vampiric mayhem. Joss liked Minear’s idea, too, but was hesitant to do both stories, since they covered similar ground. Minear insisted that they not shy away from the similarities; they should develop both episodes in parallel, not as a single crossover tale but rather as companion pieces that tell the story from two points of view.

“What we decided to do was completely separate stories, although there would be natural instances in which [the vampires] would cross paths,” Minear said. “There are a few scenes in both that are not in each episode, and there is actually one point in history where they all came together. In the Spike episode, it has a particular meaning for Spike, but in the
Angel
episode we discover that there were pieces in
Buffy
that make it mean something else.” Minear’s ambitious ideas led to two of the most highly regarded episodes of their respective seasons, and the success of his directorial debut opened the door for other writer/producers, including Marti Noxon and David Fury, to direct future episodes.

To portray Spike’s complicated history in “Fool for Love,” James Marsters needed to take the character to a lot of different places in a short time frame; he went from a punk on the subway one day to a poetry-writing dandy the next. While shooting, Marsters mentioned that it was like being back in repertory theater. This comment excited Joss, who hadn’t acted much since his days on the Winchester stage. He said, “You know what we should do? Let’s have Shakespeare readings!”

Joss, of course, had studied the Bard in depth while at Winchester, and he had fond memories of his mother’s Shakespeare readings. When the BBC produced Shakespeare’s entire canon of plays in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it had also made a lasting impression on him. “It’s hilarious, how little money they had,” Joss said. “But at the same time I still think some really good stuff went on there.” To Joss, successful productions didn’t necessarily require a lot of bells and whistles. “I think Shakespeare works when it’s emotionally true,” he said. “It can be done on a
bare stage … [or] it can work completely gussied up, as long as everything is working towards emotional truth.”

What’s more, circumstances had left him with time on his hands and nothing to do: Kai, a master’s student at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, was studying in Japan, so Joss was lonely on Sundays. Thus, in the fall of 2000, Joss invited many of the cast and writers of his shows to join him at his home for a reading. There was a great buzz right off the bat, particularly after Joss assuaged some initial nervousness. If people balked because they felt that they couldn’t read Shakespeare, Joss told them, “No one cares. Just come and have fun. We’ll have a few drinks and get some food in.”

Those drinks were quite indispensable at first, as everyone was rather nervous, particularly those who were not actors. Once alcohol was introduced, things seemed to loosen up. Everyone eventually got pretty drunk, and that emboldened Joss to sit down at the piano. He told Tony Head that he could play some chords if Head would sing along. Head’s vocal skills were not a surprise, as he had a background in musical theater (at one time playing Dr. Frank-N-Furter in a stage production of
The Rocky Horror Show
) and had sung in several Buffy episodes during season four. James Marsters, who had been in several bands and performed his own original music, and Amber Benson joined in first—leading to Joss’s realization that much of his cast could sing. It was a discovery that would jump-start Joss’s long-simmering plans for a very special episode of
Buffy
.

In the meantime, the readings at Joss’s home continued. About two or three plays in, Joss, Head, and Marsters were discussing Shakespeare in depth and made a pact to read their respective favorites. “James had always had a real thing about playing Macbeth, and I had recently done a couple of scenes from
Richard III
in acting class,” Head says. “I had been given the brief of ‘make him sexy,’ and I loved it—it was a really interesting way of looking at him.” As for Joss, he had always wanted to perform the lead in
Hamlet
, the play he had worked hardest on and studied most deeply at Winchester.

“I waited, waited” to play the role, Joss confesses. And then their readings finally gave him the chance. “That was my dream and that was
doooope
,” he says. “I learned so much about it just from that experience.” How was his performance? Head said that Joss’s Hamlet was one of the best he’s ever heard. “He found nuances in it that I’ve never heard before. I mean, he’s too old for it, but he had a hang of the lines that just made it
really personal and really, really powerful,” he explains. “It’s not an easy part; it’s one of those parts that even when it’s somebody who’s really good, it just misses either at the beginning or at the end.” But Joss’s take “was uniformly brilliant.”

When Kai returned home from Japan, Joss told her what he’d been up to while she was gone. He was very defensive about it, perhaps worried that she would make fun of him, and he told her that he wasn’t going to stop. She wouldn’t have made him stop, but she was surprised; she knew it was not something she and Joss would have decided to do jointly, since she was very shy. “When you’re in a couple, you adjust yourself a bit for what is comfortable for the other person,” she explains. “You don’t go out [together] and do something that the other person really isn’t going to like. [Sometimes] it does take being separated in order to try something that you’ve always kind of wanted to do and you didn’t even know it.”

Kai wanted to support Joss in his new endeavor, but she did not want to read herself. A rule of the Shakespeare readings was that everyone in attendance had to perform, whether by reading or holding a spear. Kai was one of the few who were allowed to attend without performing. She would, however, agree to take part in one reading in which she got to pick the play: she suggested that they do “a happy one,”
The Merry Wives of Windsor
. She read alongside Alyson Hannigan, who was also not comfortable performing Shakespeare, and Nicholas Brendon’s then-wife, actress Tressa DiFiglia.

Joss’s readings were designed to be fun get-togethers, but Joss was very particular about how he cast each one. He had his standard players, such as
Angel
’s Alexis Denisof (“He knows I love it, so I’ll always say yes”), but it wouldn’t be the same group every time. According to Denisof, Joss would cast his next play by considering who was available and deciding who might be especially suited to a particular role—or especially amusing in it. “It’s not always the part that you would be good at that you get given, which is part of the fun of it,” Denisof says. “There’s no holds barred; nobody’s there to give a Royal Shakespeare Company performance.”

When Joss reached out to Julie Benz, she was initially concerned about her role on
Angel
. “He called me at home and I thought I was in trouble—anytime a producer calls me at home, I’m in trouble. He said,
‘I’m having people over on Sunday and we’re reading Shakespeare,’” she recalls. He explained the idea of the readings, and she was immediately on board. “He had me read Lady Macbeth, which I thought was fitting, playing Darla. I was a New York theater-trained actress, so I’ve been exposed to it, but a lot of the other actors there hadn’t been, and he included the writing staff too, and this was just how he socialized with everybody. It just revealed so much about who he is.”

“If you’re working with him and you express any interest or he knows that you’ve done Shakespeare or have a desire to, then he would [invite you],” says Amy Acker, who joined the
Angel
cast as Fred in the second season. “The first time, I didn’t realize there was as much drinking involved. My wine glass kept getting filled up, and by the end of it, I’m not sure I was reading [too clearly].”

“We had amazing, amazing readings,” Joss says. “I learned as much [from them] about acting and theater and Shakespeare as I had studied in school.” Head agrees: “Suddenly you saw a whole different side of people.” In fact, Kai was disturbed by the side of Joss she saw in his turn as the
Othello
villain Iago. She found herself creeped out a bit and couldn’t even look at him for a little while after. “I told him ‘I can’t talk to you right now,’” she recalls. “I needed a little time off, because he just so became that person.”

Denisof had a distinctly different turn in
The Merchant of Venice
. “I was ‘nonspecific duke with a long speech,’ and that was kind of it for the whole play,” he says. “A very high-pitched, strong lisp seemed to be the order of the day for that, which was probably shocking for any Shakespeare academics. But it got some laughs, which is what the readings are really about.

“It’s just the fun of hearing these amazing stories,” Denisof says, “and having some surprises of some people playing certain parts and an overriding enjoyment of how amazing Shakespeare is. If you’re a Shakespeare geek like I am, then it’s always pleasurable to hear Shakespeare read aloud. It’s what it’s designed for.”

Even as years passed and Joss moved on to new projects or saw old ones end, the readings continued, becoming a well-known and much-loved tradition. When Joss was working on something new, he would get a feel
for which members of his cast and crew were into Shakespeare, so he’d have new people to add to his unofficial repertory, alongside those he knew had enjoyed his readings in the past.

Many repertory members have shared the story of a particular performance of
Much Ado About Nothing
, which also happens to be Joss’s favorite. Shakespeare’s popular comedy is about two couples on very different journeys to a romantic happy ending. The first pair fall in love quickly and then are torn apart by nasty rumors, and the second bicker constantly and swear never to fall in love. In this performance, Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof played the latter couple, Beatrice and Benedick. Kai recalled that the settings included a tea party on the back lawn with quilts and finger sandwiches.

Singer and Whedon friend Angie Hart played the role of the musician Balthasar. When another character called out to Balthasar to sing them a song, Hart’s then-husband, Jesse Tobias, pulled out his guitar, Joss took up a lute, and Joss’s brother Sam pulled out a mandolin, and they began to sing “Hey Nonny Nonny.” Aside from the four of them, no one else knew what was coming—Joss had written music to the songs in the play. He had taught it to his small band about a half hour earlier. Neil Patrick Harris, who was brought along by his
How I Met Your Mother
costar Alyson Hannigan, was taken by the entire experience. “It made me want to eat a giant turkey leg until I’m sick and watch people joust,” he says. “It was an amazing Santa Monica bohemian afternoon”—which he admits makes them all sound “like we were much more hippies than we all were.”