Anthony Head: My guilt over missing eight years of my daught

Just wanted to share a very nice interview I found for 2008 when he was doing The Invisibles.

www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1018804/Anthony-Head-My-guilt-missing-years-daughters-life.html

Anthony Head: My guilt over missing eight years of my daughter's life
By TIM OGLETHORPE FOR MAILONLINE
UPDATED: 02:15 EST, 9 May 2008 
    
Tony Head is halfway through telling a story about working with his daughter when his voice cracks.
Refreshed by two sips of water, he regains his composure.
It is clear that filming alongside 19-year-old Emily, in the new BBC1 comedy drama
series The Invisibles, was about more than just parental pride.
‘It was about hanging out together, bonding, as father and daughter, and acting together,’ explains Tony, who achieved global fame as Rupert Giles in the U.S. drama Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
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On-screen family: Anthony Head with Jenny Agutter, right, who plays his wife in The Invisibles and his real daughter Emily who also co-stars with him in the TV show
‘I spent eight years away from my daughters when filming Buffy in America, so time with them now is precious.’
Tony, whose younger daughter is Daisy, 17, makes no secret of the guilt he felt at being apart from his children for so long.
‘At the end of every series, my partner Sarah and I would sit down with Emily and Daisy and say: “Are you happy for this to continue?” If they had said: “We think you should stop now,” I would have.
But they always said carry on.’
Fame through Buffy didn’t come easily, though. ‘It may not have happened at all if it hadn’t been for the coffee adverts,’ explains Tony, who first appeared on our TV screens in those cheesy Nescafe Gold Blend ads between 1987 and 1993.
‘I have no regrets about doing the adverts but they closed both TV and film doors in the UK. They limited the way people perceived me. But they gave me a reason for going abroad to find work.’
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Safecrackers: A scene from The Invisibles in which Anthony Head and Warren Clarke star as thieves
His career in America was eventually a success, thanks to Buffy, but that, too, wasn’t without its problems.
‘I remember a two-month period in LA when I got very down, when I couldn’t get work.
I’d be crying down the phone to Sarah, back in England, saying how much I wanted to come home, how it wasn’t working out.
‘Sarah told me to hang on in there. She suggested I enrolled in acting classes, and it opened my eyes to a whole new way of working.
‘I got a regular role in a sci-fi drama called VR.5 and that got me going in America and on to Buffy.’
Now back in Britain, Tony and Emily play father and daughter in The Invisibles, which is attracting audiences of more than five million.
Tony’s character, Maurice Riley, is a safecracker who has returned from living off his ill-gotten gains in Spain to share a flat with his wife Barbara (Jenny Agutter) in a Devon seaside town.
His former partner-in-crime Syd (Warren Clarke) has also moved back from the Costa Del Crime and lives nearby.
Emily plays Grace, Riley’s 21-year-old daughter who is unaware of how her father and ‘Uncle’ Syd made their money. The casting of Emily — a professional actress who has also appeared in Doc Martin and Trial And Retribution — seems certain to raise suspicions of nepotism, but these are denied by her father.
‘It wasn’t like that. I was only distantly aware that she was auditioning for the part. I was in Canada, making a film, when my agent called to say she was putting me up for the part of Maurice and Emily up for the role of my daughter.
‘The casting director and producer weren’t aware she was my daughter during auditioning.
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Anthony with Sarah Michelle Gheller in Buffy the Vampire slayer
‘I was very protective of Emily on the set. But I decided not to step in and give her suggestions about her acting.
If I thought there was another way of doing a particular scene, I’d suggest it to the director, not to her.’
Tony’s character, Maurice, was originally written as a man in his 70s and although he’s much younger, Tony is clearly concerned at being too fresh-faced for the role.
Aged 54, tall and slim and with a decent head of hair, he could pass for someone in his 40s, an impression accentuated by his choice of clothes for our interview: a battered leather jacket, a pair of dark, denim jeans, a black T-shirt, all topped off with silver, studded earrings.
‘I’m not, in terms of personality, the grumpy old man you see me playing in The Invisibles — whatever my family might tell you. I had to “learn” to be grumpy,’ he says.
‘I had to undergo a daily process of hair greying, and for the scenes where you see my
naked torso I even had my chest hairs painted grey.
Which, let me tell you, is an ignominious experience.’ The twist in The Invisibles is that retirees Maurice and Syd have barely acquainted themselves with their local Devon pub, or indeed the golf course, before they are picking up the threads of their criminal careers.
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Anthony with David Walliams in Little Britain
As Tony explains: ‘I think the pair of them derived a great deal of satisfaction from being good at what they did and the chance to return to that “successful” way of
life proved irresistible.
‘But I don’t think this is a series that in any way glorifies crime. Maurice and Syd tend to pick on targets that either deserve to lose money or barely notice it’s gone.’
Maurice Riley may be reviving his career as a safecracker but Tony is happy to live with his family in their beautiful, Queen Anne home in a village near Bath (complete with the ghost of a young girl), while making only occasional forays abroad to work.
Tony, who since his return to the UK has appeared in top-end TV dramas such as Manchild, Dr Who and Sensitive Skin, and as the Prime Minister in comedy sketch
show Little Britain, is now filming BBC drama Merlin in France, playing the young King Arthur’s father.
But he is especially keen to spend more time with Emily on the set of The Invisibles.
‘Although I might need to find a different bit of “set decoration” for series two,’ he says. ‘I took in one of our family photos, to place in my character’s lounge, when we first
started filming in Ireland, and Emily was horrified by it.
‘She said: “Couldn’t you have given them anything but that? It’s so embarrassing!” So I’ll be delving through the family albums for something more suitable, if series two
gets the go-ahead.’