Steve Pratt talks to Anthony Head about becoming the voice of a footballing villain

HOME, says actor Anthony Head, has always been Britain. “We have a very lovely place in Bath and I find it immensely grounding when I come home,” he says. There was a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s when he was away most of the year, living in the US while playing Brit Rupert Giles in Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

It was the role that made him famous – if you don’t count those Gold Blend coffee commercials with their continuing story of a romance over a cup of coffee.

He’s recently been back in the US to attend the Comic-Con in San Diego where all things comic book are discussed at length in front of an army of geeks, sorry diehard fans. “I was there a couple of weeks ago and it’s crazy. It’s a huge, huge, huge fan thing driven by media and the television and film industry,” he says.

“Coming back the driver who picked me up from the airport said, ‘What will you be doing next Mr Head, will you be relaxing?’ But that afternoon when I got back I was down mucking out the donkeys. Mucking out is great for grounding you.”

But what, I wondered, about his new found role as an international superstar footballer?

“Everything I was bad at at school is all coming to me now, “ he says. From which you can surmise that he wasn’t a star player. To tell the truth, he isn’t now. Just the voice of Flash, the school bully turned soccer superstar, because The Unbeatables is an animated movie.

He’s the villain of the piece who gets his comeuppance when a table football team comes to life to save the reputation of a village in a vital match. “There’s no doubt he is the villain, but there’s a little bit of mitigation halfway through – you can tell he’s barking mad,” says Head.

The film was made in Argentina so he was dubbing the original actor. Rupert Grint, Ralf Little and Rob Brydon are others lending their voices to the British version. Head was shown scenes from the original before recording his part. “It was exhausting because it’s a high energy performance and, because it’s animated, the characterisation is quite heightened. You can’t just sit back and be bad,” he says.

“But it’s fun to do and I’ve always wanted to do an animated feature. The thing that was great is that you’re getting an enormous amount of direction. The makers have an amazing ear – no, do it this way or that way.

Timing is absolutely crucial when you’re matching words to pictures.”

It could be the start of a whole new career, voicing animated movies. “They’re still taking an enormous amount of money to put together, but compared to the old system where you were hand-colouring they can make animated films relatively quickly.

We’ve turned out a few in the UK so perhaps it’s the start of a huge new career. I did enjoy it and the thing is you’re creating a new character,” he continues. His voice, to be precise his accent, caused something of a conundrum over his latest TV role in a new series called Dominion in which he plays a US senator. Initially, Americans said it was weird hearing Anthony Head with an American accent. “For me, doing an accent and changing the tone of my voice is part of creating a character so I jumped at the chance to play an American politician because it changes the perception of me.

Eventually they accepted it,” he says.

“Because I have quite a young voice I can play 35 or 40-year-olds and no one would think twice about it. It extends the range of what I can do. But they said why hire Anthony Head and not use his English accent? Well, it’s because I’m an actor and that’s what I do. You offer me a role and I’ll play that role.

Dominion was set in the US so why would I use any other accent but American?”

Six years in Buffy established him on both sides of the Atlantic at a time when not that many British actors were working in US series. “I did what a lot of British actors wanted to do – break into American TV. And at the same time, and this is what made it different, the series was aired on British TV swiftly after showing on US TV. Before that we didn’t know if a series would be shown over here or not.

“Now we live in a truly international market place where stuff goes backwards and forwards between countries. Take a highly successful Latin American film like The Unbeatables, bring the UK to it and it works for England.”

  • The Unbeatables (U) is showing in cinemas now