“What am I coming back as next time?” — Anthony Stewart Head, 1954–2026

Anthony “Tony” Head spent most of his life performing. Born to a family in entertainment (his father a “fairly controlling” documentary filmmaker, his mother an actress), he said in an interview that he remembered performing in a play at six and deciding that acting was the career he wanted. While his parents weren’t encouraging of his choice, both he and his elder brother Murray both ended up as singers and actors. (Murray is probably best known in the US for the singles he released with Andrew Lloyd Webber for the concept albums that originated Jesus Christ Superstar and Chess; yep, that’s him on the badly-aged banger “One Night in Bangkok”¹.) He and Murray both played Freddie Trumper in the original London run of Chess.

He did film, television, and theater, but his big breakthrough was in advertising. He was one half of the “Gold Blend” couple, a pair in a series of TV commercials who met cute over a cup of instant coffee and found love, later recreated for Gold Blend’s North American equivalent, Taster’s Choice. The ads were so successful that he had people going through his garbage in England. He decided to look for work in the U.S. in hopes of avoiding typecasting and keeping his trash bins intact.

In 1997, about the time the Taster’s Choice ads wrapped up, he was tapped as Sarah Michelle Gellar’s mentor Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the role that would probably define his career more than any other. He left the main cast of Buffy in its sixth season to spend more time with his daughters, saying later “I can’t put into words how much I missed my family when I was in LA.”² Much of his work after that was in the UK, including powerful, poisonous Uther Pendragon in Merlin, cheating asshole Rupert Mannion in Ted Lasso, and Herc in the cult audio drama Cabin Pressure. (Head was no stranger to cult projects, starring in Repo! The Genetic Opera and multiple productions of The Rocky Horror Show.)

A crush object, a complicated adversary, a mentor and de facto father; Head could play it all, and as Rupert Giles on Buffy, he got to do it all. Buffy will almost certainly be Head’s lasting legacy, a long-suffering but always supportive mentor who grew to be Buffy’s father figure and often the only understanding adult in her orbit. (In the early seasons, he’s often the only adult in the room.) Teens watched Buffy and wanted him to be their Watcher; adults watched (or re-watched) and found him hot, relatable, or both.

Head was handsome and magnetic on screen, and there was a warmth he could bring to his performances that gave depth to even the most difficult characters. Uther Pendragon was an inconsistently written monster, but Head made him feel real. 

That warmth appealed to be genuine. When poet Jay Hulme (in the photo above) shared his regret that the only photos he had taken with Head were from fan events that had happened before his transition, Head and his partner Sarah Fisher, an animal rights advocate, brought Hulme to their farm and spent the day with him, “took me to the fanciest restaurant I’d ever been to in my life, introduced me to their horses, took lovely photos, and printed and signed them, and even gave me tips for an essay I was writing on Shakespeare for school.” Head would later write a foreword for Hulme’s first poetry collection. He expressed genuine regret and soul-searching after several actresses went public with their negative experiences on the Buffy set, and he seemed to maintain good relationships with most of his co-stars over the years. 

Sarah Fisher died last December; Head is survived by the daughters he prioritized, Emily and Daisy, both working actors. He suggested the quote in the title as an epitaph in a BBC interview. 

And a small public service announcement: if you are eligible for the pneumonia vaccine, please consider getting one. 

1. Nearly-irrelevant side note: The recent Broadway revival appears to have cut one offensive word and kept the racism and transphobia. I’m fine with depicting racist/transphobic/otherwise shitty characters in media, but cutting one word and keeping the rest? And putting that song on morning TV? ↩︎
2. That Joss Whedon chose to depict his character abandoning the girl he’d acted as a father to in the show because the actor wanted to be more of a father to his children is…let’s just call it very Whedon. ↩︎