I’ve been staring at this for a while, not quite sure how to start it. This site runs under Giles’s name — his voice, his register, his slightly battered sense of humour. So writing about the death of Anthony Stewart Head feels strange in a way I wasn’t prepared for. We’ve lost the man who made this persona worth borrowing.
Head died yesterday, aged 72. The announcement came through official channels and tributes have been pouring in ever since, which says everything about how much he was loved — not just as Giles, but as a performer and by all accounts a genuinely decent man.
For anyone who came to him through Buffy, Rupert Giles was the heart of the show in ways that didn’t always get discussed. The Scooby Gang got the big emotional moments, Buffy carried the weight of the world, but Giles was the one holding everything together — and Head played him with this wonderful, layered quality. Tired but never defeated. Dry when he needed to be funny, broken when the script asked for it. His scenes with SMG in The Body, where he just sits on the floor after finding out Joyce has died — there’s no dialogue, no music, just his face. That’s the whole show in one moment, honestly.
What people forget, if they didn’t grow up in Britain, is how famous Anthony Head already was before Buffy. He spent years in a series of coffee adverts for Gold Blend — a kind of ongoing romantic drama that ran through the late ’80s and early ’90s and turned him into a household name. There’s something very funny and also very right about that trajectory. Man becomes famous making people feel things about instant coffee. Man becomes famous making people feel things about a vampire slayer. Both completely sincere.
He kept working right up until recently. Uther Pendragon in Merlin was a properly good performance — a man you could understand even when you were furious at him. And his turn in Ted Lasso as Rupert Mannion, Rebecca’s awful ex-husband, was one of those castings that felt designed to wrong-foot you. You expected to like him and weren’t quite allowed to. He made it work.
He also had a genuinely good singing voice, which the Once More With Feeling episode made brilliant use of. His version of the Exposition Song is a small comedy gem. It’s the kind of thing only a performer who doesn’t take himself too seriously could pull off.
72 is not old enough. Rest well, Mr Head.
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