Nicholas Brendon at nickbrendon.com: The official Web site

About.com

Nicholas Brendon has provided the comic relief on Buffy the Vampire Slayer for seven years. From high school nerd to adult flunkie, Xander has always had a crack about the various monsters the gang has faced over the years. In person, it’s easy to see where that sense of humor comes from.

From posing for photos with goofy expressions to going off on random tangents during an interview, it seems Brendon is Xander. And we’ll see a lot more of him next year, as he goes on to star in his own series for Fox.

What was the last week of filming like? I’ve been doing two shows. I’ve been doing a sitcom for Fox that’ll come out next year on the Fox network, so I was very hectically coordinating Buffy and the emotions of that, and then starting this new show. So, saying goodbye to my old cast and saying hello to my new cast. It’s been a very strange week. I haven’t really had a second to really reflect. Wednesday [April 16] was the last day. I cried when I left, like a little baby whose pants were soiled. Change me, mommy, change me. You’re not my mommy. I’m being kidnapped. Christ, where am I? I’m not Mexican. Why am I in Mexico? What the f*ck’s going on right now? So yeah, it was very emotional, but I was very lucky to have booked this pilot, to have the work continue on. But it’s just been a really weird week for me and I’ve been very busy and I haven’t really had time to reflect. Me and my wife are going to Chicago on Sunday and on the plane we’ll have to talk and say, “What the F just happened?”

In the finale, does Xander still fight blind? Yes, you know, Xander loves to fight blondes. I think it’s very evident when he fought Harmony.

How about blind, B-L-I-N-D, since Caleb poked his eye out? I had a sword fight and it was tough. Does he love to fight blind? Would you?

I just asked if he could. Yes, he can, but I don’t think he loves it.

What do you think of losing the eye? I think it’s actually great. The idea would be like we would love to do a film and I think we’re going to, and I talked to Joss about it. Xander’s not going to have some mystical eye grow back. He’s going to have an eye patch.

Can he still do construction work? I think he’s going to change. He’s not going to build 3D anymore. He’s going to be more of a 2D type guy, which means he’s going to be poor. “Here’s my concept. Everything’s in 2D.”

How have you felt about playing the everyman who has no special powers? He does. Actually, I think Xander’s power was the most extraordinary because it was wit. The tongue is mightier than the sword, my friend.

How do you feel about the ultimate arc you got to follow? Listen, he’s been a fantastic character and apparently people really, really relate to him. So, I can’t complain about anything. I think Xander’s helped out a lot of kids and a lot of adults throughout the country and the world, and the show has been fantastic.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Official Magazine
April 2003
By Abbie Bernstein

Buffy may have all sorts of problems thrown at her every day, but it’s easy to forget that Xander does, too – and he doesn’t have Slayer powers to help him deal with them. Abbie Bernstein chats to actor Nicholas Brendon about his time on the show.

While it’s unwise to confuse actors with their characters – after all, the whole idea of acting is to pretend to be somebody you’re not – it’s easy to imagine that Xander Harris, the most normal member of the Scooby Gang, would thoroughly approve of Nicholas Brendon’s approach to bringing him to life each week on Buffy. Nicholas says he takes each scene as it comes. “As an actor, whatever is given to me, I try to do to the best of my ability.”

This directness applies whether Xander is throwing out his customary quips, wretchedly confessing his most shameless self-doubts in “Hell’s Bells,” or bursting into song and dance in “Once More, With Feeling.”

“You do it,” Nicholas says plainly. “Don’t overthink stuff. That’s my motto in life – don’t overthink, because it’ll screw you up, every time.”

A native of Los Angeles, California, Nicholas came to professional acting relatively late. “I wanted to be a baseball player,” he recalls. A severe arm injury curtailed this ambition, so he set his sights elsewhere.

“I got into acting when I was about 25. I started when I was about 21, because I had a stutter, and so I wanted to challenge myself.” Acting class helped him address his difficulty in speaking – Nicholas was given “eight or nine tongue-twisters” as verbal exercises. “It worked out well for me.”

In fact, it has worked out so well that Nicholas has quite literally become the poster figure for the Stuttering Foundation of America. “For the third year in a row, I’m their spokesperson. It’s an honor.”

Along with ease of speech, acting class also proved to Nicholas that he wanted to perform. He landed a few commercials early on, along with guest shots in the comedies Married… With Children and Dave’s World. On-stage, he starred in Los Angeles-area productions including The Further Adventures of Tom Sawyer, My Own Private Hollywood and Out of Gas at Lover’s Leap.

Meanwhile, Nicholas contemplated studying medicine and supplemented his income as a production assistant, a plumber’s assistant, a veterinary janitor, waiter, delivery man and in one other field that has come in handy over the last few years when Xander needs to look realistic on the job: “I’ve done some carpentry back in my day,” Nicholas reveals, “and I’ve got friends who’ve done it, so I know enough about it to make it somewhat real. I couldn’t build a house, but I could build a closet.”

Then came the fateful audition for a series on a fledgling network with an odd-sounding title. Buffy the Vampire Slayer turned out to be one of the best-regarded TV shows of its era and Xander continues to be a goldmine of a part, but Nicholas admits that, in the beginning, things like quality and character growth were secondary to the fact of simply being a series regular.

“Buffy was the first time I booked, really, so I wasn’t too particular. I was lucky enough to be hired and to be doing the show.”

Seven years later, Nicholas still feels lucky to be doing Buffy. “I’m jazzed to be part of the cast.”

Like Xander, Nicholas is willing to venture into the unknown with his friends, though in his case, he didn’t risk life and limb but rather singing and dancing in the musical episode “Once More, With Feeling.”

“I didn’t have a very good time,” he jokes. “No, I had a great time doing it! In all honesty, it changed my life a little bit. I didn’t do any musical theater when I was growing up. So when I went into this musical, I wasn’t terrified. I went into acting and I didn’t know what I was doing and then I hooked this show, so my thing was, when Joss said, ‘We’re doing a musical,’ I’m like, ‘Cool. I’ve got nothing to prove. I’m not a singer or dancer – whatever I do is better than what I haven’t done.’ It’s funny, when we were doing this episode – sometimes you have to get up at five o’clock in the morning when the alarm goes off, it’s a hard wake-up, and then you snooze a lot. But with this episode, I would bounce out of bed. I loved going to the studio and singing. I’d sing for two hours and my voice went away after a few sessions and then working on the dancing and then having it all come together – I had the best time of my life, just a blast.”

Being directed by Joss Whedon is always a pleasure in any case, Nicholas points out: “He just knows exactly what he wants, so we’re not doing any extra coverage. He knows exactly where the shot’s going to go, why it’s going to go that way. Everything’s very succinct. [Marti is] similar.”

The soundtrack for “Once More, With Feeling” is out on CD and has hit the charts. The notion that Nicholas – along with his Buffy castmates – has an album out hasn’t entirely sunk in so far, he acknowledges: “I haven’t thought about that yet … it’s kind of cool!” He even posed for the reference photos used by artist Adam Hughes to create the paintings of characters used on the CD cover: “Joss actually took pictures with his camera.”

Nicholas says he usually learns what’s in store for Xander on a script-by-script basis. He doesn’t make suggestions to the writers as to what he thinks Xander ought to do next. “I don’t do that. Why? [The writers] do such a good job.”

As an actor, Nicholas tries not to overprepare for the big emotional moments, which Xander had plenty of in Season Six – the “Hell’s Bells,” terror of becoming his father and subsequent anguished separation from Anya, the gut-wrenching disgust of finding out that both Anya and Buffy had slept with Spike in “Entropy,” and the soul-bearing tenderness he displays toward the apocalyptic Willow in “Grave” are all cases in point. “Whatever they give me, I’ll do. But yeah, as a character, it was nice to be doing that.”

“Grave” stands out as a particular favorite: “I saved the world! I saved the world!” Nicholas chants playfully. “The great part about that [yellow crayon] monologue was the fact that, just as an actor – after I read it, I cried. And if I’m crying reading it the first time, and then I work with it, when it affects [the actor] that way, when you see it – thank you [Joss Whedon] very much for doing that. If I can in a nutshell break down last season, I’m going to say ‘Yellow Crayola crayon!’”

Season Six of Buffy got a fair amount of press for its occasional nudity. Nicholas got to wear pajamas when Xander was seen in bed with Anya, but this didn’t prevent him from being in scenes when other actors were unclothed.

“It threw us,” Nicholas admits. “I had to walk in on a scene [in “Gone”] where James was having sex with invisible Sarah/Buffy. I go to say ‘Spike’ … “ Nicholas’ first instinct was to make the situation less awkward for James, which was at odds with Xander’s attitude in the scene. “[Talking to] my buddy, it’s like,” Nicholas adopts a completely relaxed tone, “Dude – oh, right, you’re Spike.” His voice at once becomes hostile. “Hey, what’re you doing? God, that’s disgusting!”

Not only has Xander been allowed to remain fully dressed so far this season, but his apparel has also changed to some extent, with Hawaiian shirts giving way to the occasional business suit. “A little bit, yeah,” Nicholas smiles. “They’re still trying to figure that out – they’re never going to figure my wardrobe out. But you know, that’s the thing with Xander – he doesn’t really have a wardrobe, so it’s nice, it’s funny that people talk about it, but it’s nice to keep people on their toes a little bit.”

During his time on Buffy, Nicholas has co-starred in two feature films, Psycho Beach Party and Pinata, the latter featuring Nicholas’ now-wife, actress Tressa DiFiglia (who, in a six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-like bit of casting, appears with Nicholas’ erstwhile Buffy co-star Amber Benson in director/writer/producer/star Amber’s feature film Chance). Although “Psycho Beach Party was more campy,” Nicholas notes, it has slasher-film elements, while Pinata is straight-out horror and Buffy is, well, full of vampires and other monsters. Nicholas says he doesn’t have a particular attraction to horror as an actor, however. “That’s what came along. I mean, horror movies scared me.”

Like everyone else involved in Buffy, Nicholas doesn’t know what the future holds for the show, though he is contracted for an eighth season should the series proceed. Meanwhile, he continues to balance his original instincts as a performer with what he’s learned over seven years working on a bona fide hit: “My take on acting is that I always wanted to [maintain] my feelings and my process of when I first booked this show. I was very innocent, so I always try to keep that kid-like innocence in my acting. Obviously, it changed with success, but I try to keep it simple. Success is fantastic – I try to build on that and still keep it very simple.”

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Official Magazine
April 2003
ByAbbie Bernstein

We’ve heard what Nick Brendon thinks about Xander, but what do his Buffy colleagues think? Time to find out…

On discussing Nicholas Brendon and Xander Harris, executive producer Marti Noxon makes it clear that Mutant Enemy is totally jazzed to have him: “I think Nick is a tremendously talented guy. He can do anything. He can do humor and obviously serious drama.

“I thought his stuff in the wedding episode last season was so strong, where he and Anya did not get married. He can really break your heart. And the scene he had with Anya at the end of the Anya episode [“Selfless”] this season was just heart-breaking. So I think he’s evolved from being sort of the funny, cute kid to being a very dramatic, funny man. I think that you’ve definitely watched him grow up on the show. What I’ve seen definitely is him growing into his own, in terms of his own comfort level, knowing what his talents are and his strengths, and also knowing that he’s not just a funny guy, but also that he has a real strong ability as a dramatic actor.”

Xander gets so many funny lines that it’s sometimes easy to forget that he goes through more than his fair share of suffering, both emotional and physical. James Marsters (a.k.a. Spike), who knows a bit about playing a tormented soul, says that he thinks Nicholas does a great job of conveying Xander’s resilience in the face of great pain: “Xander, like all the characters in Buffy, that are Joss and Marti, they have to go to their fire. And no one goes through more fire than the character of Xander. He goes through more adversity and more getting put down – you’ve just got to believe that he will prevail. The character doesn’t give up, you know? Xander will prevail.”

Marti feels that Nicholas’ work as Xander gives the audience someone who stands for them: “I think we [the Buffy creative team] have become more conscious of what his role is, trying to define his role without giving him superpowers. At a certain point, we had talked about, ‘Well, maybe we’ll give him some kind of special power like the others.’ Especially this year, as we’re perhaps drawing to a close, we’ve been trying to be clearer about everybody’s strengths and what they bring to the party. In Nicky’s case, I think that what he brings to the party is the bravery of the common man and the loyalty of the common man. It’s easy to herald the general and the person with all the special talents, but really, what about the guy who’s in the field? And that’s Xander. I mean, he in some ways takes more risks than anybody, because he doesn’t have any special powers, so I think as a character, we’ve sort of defined him more as a hero, but also a hero that represents the rest of us.”