ANTHONY HEAD
Anthony, 64, plays one of the ensemble cast in divorce drama The Split.
He’s married to animal behaviour consultant, Sarah. The couple have two daughters, Emily, 29, and Daisy, 26.
The Split revolves around a family of female lawyers. Where exactly does your character, Oscar, fit in? Oscar was once married to the high-powered senior partner, Ruth (Deborah Findlay), and is the father of Hannah (Nicola Walker), Nina (Annabel Scholey) and Rose (Fiona Button). He left for America with the nanny when the girls – now all lawyers in the firm – were aged 11, six, and two, but now his arrival back in the UK is a hand grenade.
It sounds complicated… It is, but then so is life, and since this drama has been written by award-winning writer Abi Morgan – who I’d worked with before on The Iron Lady – it completely reflects that. Oscar could have just been a bad guy who abandoned his wife and kids, but, actually, there are so many layers here. The series looks at the whirlpool of destruction that divorce sucks people into. I found myself thinking, ‘Divorce is now so much a part of the fabric of our society, why hasn’t someone done a drama about this before?’
Presumably his daughters are in two minds about his return?
It’s tricky with Hannah, the eldest, who was old enough to have a real relationship with her dad before he left. Hannah is in the middle of ‘divorcing’ her mother, too, by going to work for a rival law firm, so the arrival of her father is a spanner in the works at an emotional time.
Your life seems to be the opposite. So what did you draw on?
Sarah and I have been married for nearly 30 years and I’ve never doubted our relationship. During the five years I was a regular in Buffy
The Vampire Slayer, I was living in LA and Sarah was back at home with our girls. I came back whenever I could, but it was tough. I used those feelings when playing Oscar.
Interesting you made your life with a non-actress…
Sarah works with animals and she’s incredibly knowledgeable about them. One of our dogs came to us as a rescue. His behaviour was so bad he was going to be put down, but Sarah worked out that he had chronic heartburn that made him aggressive. Now he takes antacids and is the best dog. Which roles are you most recognised for?
People often aren’t too sure what they know me from, so I have to stand there and go through my CV until we hit the right show. It might be Buffy or even those old Gold Blend ads in which I was the love interest living downstairs. Then there’s Little Britain, in which I played the Prime Minister that David Walliams lusted after. Funny, but when you’ve appeared, as I did, in one episode, wearing a thong and carrying a feather duster, people tend to remember!
The six-part series, The Split, will be shown on BBC1 from mid-april.