When the cast and crew assembled to film the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they had no idea they were at the beginning of a show that would become a huge international hit. Indeed, those initial 12 episodes were all completed well before transmission, leaving the players to work in a void, with no feedback from viewers.

But when the audience response eventually came, it came in a flood. Anthony Stewart Head remembers that first day when Buffy started to make it big.

"We were in hiatus and I was talking to Alyson [Hannigan] on the phone," he tells Xpose. "I was saying, 'How's it going? What's the word?' She said, 'Have you looked on the Internet? You've got your own website, it's so cool!' It was astonishing when I first logged on. And it's grown and grown."

With a second season confirmed, Head enjoyed the hiatus in his native England. All the same, like the show's many fans he was eager to discover what the future of the series would hold. Season one's regular villain, The Master, had been defeated in "Prophesy Girls." Who would take his place? Head posted the question to Buffy creator Joss Whedon.

"I said, 'What have you got up your sleeve,'" Head recalls. "He was saying, 'We've got these two great characters Spike and Drusilla.' Just the names were enough! He said, 'She's mad as a hatter and he puts spikes in people!' They were such great characters."

The two vampires, played with relish by James Marsters and Juliet Landau, were just the first delightful surprises in a season marked by awesome changes. In came a new member of the Scooby Gang, the laconic lycanthrope Oz (Seth Green). Out went Angel's soul, lost through one true moment of happiness with Buffy, which left the vampire a heartless killer who would ultimately team up with Spike and Drusilla. And out, in a very big way, went Giles's love interest, Miss Calendar (Robia La Morte), brutally murdered by Angel in the stand-out episode "Passion."

"That was just the best script," states Head. "Ty King wrote that and when I first read it there were chills down my spine."

The first two years of Buffy had witnessed some minor changes in Giles, but nothing like those engendered by the tragedy in "Passion." By the episode's climax, the normally sedate Watcher was grief-stricken and seeking revenge. Out on his own, he tracks down the vampires' lair intending to stake Angel--but Buffy stops him. The exchange between the two characters, filled with raw emotion, stands as one of the most extraordinary scenes in the entire series.

"For my money, there was one take that was lovely," Head sighs. "The two of us just folded into each other, just sobbing. But it was possibly too much. Actors always wanted to do everything--all the emotion. Joss's point is that if you show too much emotion then you don't leave the viewer anywhere to go. His point is just give them enough and then pull back, otherwise you open the floodgates.

"I sang on that episode," the actor reveals. "There's a really sweet scene by Jenny's grave and I said, 'I'd really like to sing a little lament.' Two friends at the time were taking it in turns to write the music for the show and I put it to Joss. He said, 'Actually it's not a bad idea.' So I sang--it's wordless, it's very sweet and it plays over her grave."

By the season's end Whedon left the Scooby Gang in something of a sorry mess. The bereaved Giles had been captured and tortured by Spike, Drusilla and Angel, the second Slayer Kendra was dead, and Buffy, after sending her ex-boyfriend to Hell, quit Sunnydale and left her friends behind. These life-changing events invested the series with maturity, while Whedon began moving the pieces around during season three, setting the scene for the farewell to High School and a spin-off series for Angel and Cordelia.

Head has fond memories of "Band Candy," the third season episode that sees the return of Ethan Rayne (Robin Sachs), who is in league with Mr. Trick (K Todd Freeman), poisoning candy bars that cause Sunnydale's adults to revert to errant teenagers.

Interviewed in Xpose #37, Armin Shimerman, who plays Principal Snyder, had kind words to say about Head's performance in that episode, but felt that his own work on the episode was too over-the-top. When I mention this to Head, he is having none of it.

"He was great!" the actor enthuses. "It was a great choice because Kristine and I and he all had different teen ages. You could see he was one of those kids that developed late and it makes sense for Snyder. You could see he was still playing with action men!"

For fans, "Band Candy" will always be remembered as the episode in which Giles and Buffy's mom got it together. Indeed, many assumed that a long-term relationship was in the works, but Whedon nixed the idea as too predictable.

"There was the great moment when we go into a kiss and she says, 'Wait a moment' and takes the gum out of her mouth," Head imparts. "Then the scene went on and as we disappear out of sight she said, 'It fastens at the front.' They cut it because Joss said, 'You can't better the bubble gum gag.' I'm not sure that the bubble gum gag quite played because of the way it was shot. But it was such fun."

As the third season progressed, so viewers began to try to second guess Whedon's story arc. With the Gang moving off to college in season four, how would Giles and his role as librarian fit into the scheme of things? Part of the answer came in "Helpless," in which Giles violates the orders of the Council of Watchers. The result: he is stripped of his position and a new Watcher, Wesley (Alexis Denisof), is brought in to replace him. For the remainder of the season we were left with a wonderful dynamic. The once stuffy Giles is now the rebel, contradicting the pompous Wesley.

"Whether I'll become an official Watcher again I don't know," shrugs Head. "It would be quite interesting to see Giles let go of it--he's not constrained by the Watchers' guidelines any more. And even if he was taken back as a Watcher I think he'd have a very different attitude to the idiots in England, since they completely screwed everything up.

"It puts a completely different spin on the way I play Giles and gives me a whole new range of colors to play with."

Away from Sunnydale, Head has been devoting his time to producing an animated film, which he hopes will begin shooting immediately.

"We finished the treatment and it's looking great," he enthuses. "You know you've got something good when your partner says, 'Please let's not fax this unless we have to, don't leave it lying around...'

"We're trying to do as many things that have not been done before in animation as we can. Generally animated films follow regimented paths; there is a way of doing things and we're busting out a little bit. We've got a very interesting take on casting it."

The project's roots go back 16 years, when Head and his brother began toying with ideas. The actor's high profile has certainly helped propel the script forward and Head admits that his role as Frank'N'Furter in the stage version of the The Rocky Horror Show gave him awareness of a genre that was woefully ignored.

"I've done a few musicals in England but Rocky is the only one that is simple, hard core rock and roll," he insists. "They are great songs and it stands or falls on the fact that you don't have to have a 40 piece orchestra sawing away under the stage. You don't have to have incredible sets--Rocky was originally done on a bare stage with bits of stage cloth.

"I set out to write something that was simple that could be done either way--with a lot of money or on the cheap. The animated film has moved on from that particular area because the point of animation is that you can go anywhere. Your imagination is no longer fettered by the concepts of it being on stage."

As the actor begins to concentrate on movie production it seems logical to ask if he has ever considered writing an episode of Buffy.

"No," he responds, "but I think I'll probably direct this season. I think Nicky [Brendon] might be able to write one, I don't know. It's so specific and it has such specific rhythms that I wouldn't want to mess with it. When I'm having my own ideas anyway, why the hell bother? I've got enough on my plate."

Although Head has directed stage productions before, Buffy would be his first experience of TV or film.

"It's gone from, 'I wonder if I dare?' to a number of people saying, 'You're going to, of course!' Now I'm watching things [being shot] and going, 'I wouldn't have done it like that.' So now it's time."

To prepare myself for the editing side of a director's job, Head has been observing at editing sessions.

"Also, before I went to drama school, my father worked for a documentary film company and I worked for three or four months as an assistant editor. It was an extremely valuable experience.

"I think visually. The difficulty would just be working out the logistics of how I could prep and be in an episode at the same time, so we might have to work something out."

We've seen another side of Head's skills (in every respect) in a recent episode of Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place. The actor's one-off role became top showbiz news when it was reported that he was doing a scene in the nude.

"It's a nice little comedy," he smiles. "It started off as a very boring professor of anatomy and he paints nude self portraits. When I first got the script it said he has to take his clothes off. I'm not in bad shape but I'm not buff, as it were. I found myself doing a lot of press ups suddenly!

"I turned up on set and they were seeing me with my earring and not Giles. They said, 'We could make him sexier couldn't we?' Suddenly the whole storyline changed and I become not Mr. Boring but Mr. Smooth. I became a threat to the lead character, he thinks I'm after his girlfriend. But I still take my clothes off."

Head's verdict on appearing on TV across the whole of North America without any clothes?

"People kept saying, 'You're very brave,'" he laughs. "I was hoping it wasn't a comment on my physique! Having done Frank I don't have a problem about my sexuality. I did some fairly outrageous things as Frank--my bottom was hanging out, so I'm not particularly shy."

As for the future of Buffy, there seems to be both good news and bad. With the show's popularity going from strength to strength, it's likely that a movie version will be in theaters before much too long.

"I think Joss may wait until the end of the five years," Head muses. "The difficulty being the story arcs are quite complex within the show. The X-Files does have story arcs that overlap but they are less obvious, they are less shaped, so you can dip in and dip out. The thing is with Buffy, where do you dip into the story and where do you dip out? And do you assume that the viewer has seen the show and knows what happened or do you paint a completely new picture? It's hard."

The bad news? Buffy is currently in its fourth season. The cast are contracted up the end of the fifth year, and with Sarah Michelle Gellar enjoying a successful film career, it seems likely the Scooby Gang will disband in 2001. Of course, there are cases (The X-Files, recent Star Trek series) where shows have endured to seven years, but Head thinks that is unlikely to happen on Buffy.

"I don't see the point," he concludes. "I think a seven year contract would just be putting a strain on everything.

"I'm always a firm believer that you get out when you're having fun."

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If you can't wait for the next episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, just bear in mind that you are not alone. Even Anthony Stewart Head, who stars as the now-disgraced Watcher Rupert Giles, admits that he looks forward to each story with mounting enthusiasm.

"I can't wait to get the scripts because it's always an exciting read," he enthuses. "It makes me laugh. I still get the same buzz I got when I first read the pilot script. I remember I was sitting in a restaurant thumbing through it and desperately turning over the page to find out what happens and just laughing out loud."

It's obvious, as Xpose meets with Head at a restaurant in Beverly Hills, that this is a man who remains unaffected by the trappings of Hollywood and celebrity. A down to Earth Brit, the actor divides his time between his own country (where his family still live) and Los Angeles, where Buffy is filmed. And this eclectic lifestyle all resulted from a cup of coffee.

Still remembered by millions as the guy from the Taster's Choice commercials, Head originally came to the public attention in his own country in their equivalent ads, for Nescafe Gold Blend. Despite an impressive career that already included roles in successful British shows like Secret Army, Accident, Bergerac, and Howard's Way, the public seemed most eager to embrace Head as the handsome, amorous coffee drinker who entered their lives for regular, brief stints in the episodic ads.

"When I was doing the coffee commercial in England I remember being at a 25th anniversary that Nestle had," Head explains. "I was having lunch with all these people and I remember saying, 'It would be really good if this advert was seen in America.' Somebody said, 'Yeah but it would be called something else, they don't have Gold Blend out there.' Then about five weeks later I heard that they were casting for an American commercial."

Like their UK counterpart, the Taster's Choice commercials proved a phenomenon, allowing Head to secure an agent and seek work in Hollywood.

Before Buffy he would win guest parts in NYPD Blue and Highlander, and star as Oliver Sampson in Fox's short-lived fantasy show VR5. Yet it would take the role of Sunnydale High School's Librarian Giles to reinvent the actor's career.

A spin-off from the maligned movie, Buffy the Vampire Slayer began life in 1996 as an untransmitted 20-minute presentation for the WB network. Looking back to those early days, Head recalls his first meeting with leading lady Sarah Michelle Gellar at the audition.

"She said afterwards, 'I couldn't believe it--I'm sitting next to the coffee guy!'" he laughs, "She was testing for the role of Cordelia and they said, 'Try this [the role of Buffy]!' It was very cool."

Having chosen his leading ensemble, Whedon assembled the cast at his home for the first readthrough.

"The chemistry was extremely good," Head remarks. "It was evident early on, especially when we came back for the full season. I think one of the successes of the show is that Joss's casting is bang on. There isn't a weak link--it's a really strong cast and everybody just does great work."

Mention that 20 minute pilot episode (a very rough, abridged version that was later re-filmed as "Welcome to the Hellmouth") and Head cringes. "It was painful," he sighs. "We shot the last scene first and I was trying to do what I'd done in the interview. It's always a great mistake to try and remember what impressed them. I was acting my little head off!

"We only did a four day shoot and I came in a day or two later and I happened to walk past them watching the dailies and it was like [grimaces]. So the two big scenes where I met Buffy, which we shot in this very strange library set, I pulled it all back in.

"It was a very unusual experience. Joss was having a lot of trouble with the crew, it was the first time he had really directed and [the crew just looked on it as] a four day job."

One key cast member was missing from that pilot episode: Alyson Hannigan, who would capture the hearts of fans as the shy and plain Willow. For this practice run the role was taken by Riff Regan, who had been the producers' initial choice.

"She was lovely," Head recalls. "I was very fond of her but there was no doubt about it, when I read the script that wasn't the way I read Willow at all. I had always seen someone like Alyson when I read it. She was very good but I think it was one of those cases when they decided to do an opposite. You can't fight what's written: if it's written one way you can't squeeze it the other way."

Buffy premiered on the fledgling WB network in January 1997, for an initial run of just 12 episodes. Few people initially had high expectations of Whedon's blend of teenage soap opera, horror, comedy and action. Yet, as "Welcome to the Hellmouth" hit the screens, it soon became apparent that Buffy was something very special indeed.

"It almost was successful in spite of itself," reasons Head. "There is nothing else like it on TV. Nothing. And there never has been and there probably will be now--there will be a lot of things that try and go along the same lines.

"I know that when the ratings first started coming in they were good. No one went, 'Oh my god, we're going to come off next week!' I remember around about episode 10 of the first season we were hanging on to find out if we were going to be picked up, and I remember there being a big celebration when we were. It was by no means in the pocket. Then when we got picked up for the second season there was a big sigh of relief. You never know with American TV with any kind of entertainment. The powers that be sometimes don't understand.

"The course it has taken is exactly what Joss said it would be: it has been a slow burn. He said that people would get it and it would spread by word of mouth, not really by publicity. Yes, Sarah's had a great crest of a wave from it and they've both complemented each other, but ultimately it's word of mouth that has spread the show. The number of adults who say, 'I didn't want to watch it because I knew it was a teen show and then someone told me I had to, and now I am hooked'..."

So why has the series, which focuses on the unlikely premise of a teenage schoolgirl destined to fight evil, been blessed with enormous commercial and critical success?

"It 's got a very strong heart and it comes from a very human place," Head responds. "[It's the result of] Joss's deeply painful experiences at school: if he'd had a good time we wouldn't have had Buffy!

"We are given extremely good stuff to work with, Joss is an extraordinary writer and he writes humanly. There's never a point that you feel it's a strain. And if ever you do feel strained you can say, 'Can I change this?' And genuinely if there is a reason for it he will say, 'Yes.' There are occasions when he will say, 'No, that's the gag.' Or 'No you can't do that on that beat.' He's very specific about what works and what doesn't work which is very refreshing.

"The great thing is you have no idea where it's going to go. Joss keeps it very much under his belt. People say to me, 'What's going to happen to you?' and I say, 'I don't know and I don't wanna know.' If you know what's going to happen to your character you start to play the end of the scene. I kicked myself the other day: I was playing an emotional scene and we'd played the scene before it and I was playing part of the energy of the next scene. If you play against the energy of the next scene it comes as more of a surprise."

The only adult among Buffy's ensemble of leading characters, Giles provides a refreshingly stuffy outlook to contrast with the teenage perspective. Not that the librarian hasn't changed at all--on the contrary, throughout the first three seasons he has matured incredibly, the result of several key incidents in the series. But, back in those early days, Giles was a very serious Englishman who studied at Oxford University and had been curator of a museum in England before being assigned as Buffy's Watcher. Initially working with sketchy details gleaned from early scripts, Head chose to invent his own backstory for Giles.

"Joss and I had similar but differing backstories," Head reveals. "Joss had an idea of who The Watchers were and what their place in the world is. I had a slightly different picture which informed me better. But within my picture I knew he'd not got on with his father.

"Joss's vibe was that like some villages in England are famous for their cheese, there's a village in Cheshire or something that is famous for its Watchers. My vibe was that it had been in my family for generations. Active duty had skipped generations but someone had always been on call in case.

"I had an early line in "Never Kill a Boy in the First Date" which was basically 'I wanted to be an RAF pilot or a grocer and my father wouldn't let me.' That gave me the idea that I'd never seen eye to eye with my father and it was about shouldering your duty and dealing with it. So I knew there was some kind of rebellion there and it wasn't something I found difficult to play. It's always been easy to play different colours: I don't feel I've ever been in a position where they've made me contradict what I've already played."

Back in the first season, Giles's role in the series was predominantly passive. While he would teach Buffy, train her in self defense and instruct her on how to fulfill her destiny, the Watcher was never proficient in combat situations himself. On several occasions, he was knocked unconscious, allowing Buffy the spotlight. Gradually Giles would enter more active service, allowing an eager Head the chance to take on board some stunts and active fights.

"Logically it made sense," says the actor of this development. "Initially, the reason why I kept getting knocked out was because as I was an adult you would expect me to jump into the fray and try to save her. Basically they had to think, 'What are they going to do with Giles?' because you can't turn up and save the day because it's Buffy's show. So they'd knock me out a lot!

"Then gradually as time went on her role had established itself and it just meant we could have more bigger fights and more complex stuff. Everything fits into place--when it's time for something to happen, the storylin