Official Anthony Stewart Head VR5

BEST KNOWN to television viewers as the smooth-talking caffeine-guzzling neighbour in the long-running Nescafe Gold Blend and Taster's Choice coffee adverts, British actor Anthony Head is playing another charmer, Oliver Sampson, in the cyberspace thriller series VR.5. However, unlike the commercials, Head's virtual smoothie represents a mysterious and possibly evil super corporation known as The Committee -- and he's not much of a coffee-drinker!

Head's latest series, VR.5, toplines Lori Singer (Fame, Footloose, Short Cuts) as Sydney Bloom, a brilliant computer hacker who inadvertently enters the highest form of Virtual Reality, VR.5. Once there, Sydney can enter and affect the unconscious minds of others; she can explore and enter dreams, memories and thoughts, thus affecting their real-life behaviour.

For Sydney, VR.5 represents a chance to save her traumatized mother, Nora (played by Oscar winning Louise Fletcher, best known as Nurse Rachett in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), and solving the mystery surrounding the deaths of her father, Joseph (David McCallum of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Sapphire and Steel fame) and twin sister some years earlier. However, for The Committee, Sydney represents a talent to be exploited.

Against her better judgement, Sydney is enlisted to complete difficult and often dangerous assignments with VR.5. The Committee is initially represented by Dr. Frank Morgan (No Way Out's Will Patton), a professor of virtual philosophy who becomes Sydney's advisor and technical confidant. However, Morgan is soon killed to make way for Anthony Head's character, the cold and calculating Oliver Sampson. Although there is an element of attraction between Sydney and Sampson, it is unclear what his motives are or how much she can trust him, if at all.

Cult Times spoke to Anthony Head while he was shooting the final episode of VR.5's first season. Since our interview, it has been announced that Fox will not be renewing the visually stunning but hopelessly complicated Sci-Fi series for a second year.

Q. Turning to VR.5, do you think that the Gold Blend and Taster's Choice coffee adverts played a part in your casting as Oliver Sampson?

A .They didn't seem to play a big part, they always seemed to be rather incidental. The producers had my [promotional] tape, but they weren't on it. When they came up in the conversation, the producers would take the attitude that I had them behind me as well as my other work. They could see Oliver's charm in the adverts, but they couldn't see the danger of the character. Actually, my casting might have had more to do with a movie I did over here with Jim Belushi called Royce, where I played the psychopath. Mix that with the adverts and you've kind of got Oliver Sampson.

Q. You mention that the coffee ads aren't on your tape. Is that because you're trying to distance yourself from them?

A. No. It's just that although they're drama, and it's a part like anything else, to me they don't have a place on my tape. I tried. I did have one on my last tape, but when I viewed it again, it didn't feel right, the adverts have a different texture, you're selling a product. It's difficult to explain but it wasn't a question of removing myself from them, they just didn't feel right on the tape. If someone asked me for a collection of them. I could give all the adverts to them quite happily. But I've got plenty of work that I've done in England and in America that come together much better -- actually, I'm not in a situation where I have more material than I know what to do with!

Q. VR.5 is your first Science Fiction show. What do you like about it?

A. I like the way that it's not formula and it's not ridiculous. The scripts are seriously wacky -- it's like 'Whoa, where did that come from?' -- but at the same time it's not Sci-Fi like such series as TekWar; it's only Sci-Fi because this form of virtual reality doesn't exist yet, but given the growth in technology it's not inconceivable. Built on that, there's a fascinating mystery-drama story of Sydney Bloom trying to find her roots, and trying to find out what's happened to her father. I represent an extremely powerful and well financed organization called The Committee who want to utilize her talent, so I'm sent in to get her to do things by offering her snippets of information. So I'm a manipulator basically.

It's fascinating TV. I guess it's like The Prisoner, The Avengers, Twin Peaks and Quantum Leap all mixed together; except that Quantum Leap became predictable. It was a great success but after a while you knew what was going to happen, he was going to leap into someone's body and the only thing that was fascinating was to find out what he had to find out about the person.

We've got people on this show who steer away from the obvious. For example, every time we have a fight we try to make it a struggle like a scuffle rather than an elaborately choreographed karate-fight. When I killed my first person, I broke his neck!

Q. You described Oliver as a cross between that old smoothie in the coffee adverts and the psychopath in Royce. Now that does sound like a fun character to play ...

A. He is. Initially, he doesn't give much away, he's very closed off and is therefore extremely perplexing, but as time goes on, we learn more about him and his relationship with Sydney develops. Maybe it will turn into a romance, maybe it won't. Oliver's gullible, he doesn't know everything, he's more of a middle man between Sydney and The Committee and, at the end of the day, he can only tell her what he knows himself.

Q. The show's special effects are said to be superb. What can you tell us about them?

A. Well, they've not done a lot of post-production visuals, so it's not all computer effects; if they can do it in the lens, they do it. From that point of view, they just make graphic images on set; they colorize and play with them afterwards. It's great because the people who are in virtual reality can really feel that they are in it.

Q. VR.5 is a high-concept and very complicated show; people who thought that the technobabble in Star Trek was bad haven't seen anything yet. Are you worried that viewers won't be able to understand the show?

A. No. I've heard from several people who have seen the pilot and say that it's fascinating because it does explain everything. A couple of people had said they didn't understand the concept of virtual reality and now they do because Sydney takes you through the stages of what we currently see as virtual reality to VR.5.

It's not hard to understand. Once you can accept that the brain is like another computer and therefore you can access what people are thinking without them knowing, then you've pretty much got it. The scripts get quite complex but they jump around. People didn't get bored with Twin Peaks until they figured that they were never going to get a definite answer. VR.5 has a definite story and a definite answer.

Q. What's the worst thing about making the show?

A. There's never enough time because they're being very ambitious about what they want to do and how much time we have to do it. It doesn't bother me, but I feel that I have left English TV behind, where they never have the budget or the time to do things, and now I'm here, where they have the budget but not the time, because they want to shoot as much as they can.

Q. Are you contracted to star in VR.5 for a couple of years?

A. Oh yes, they don't make TV series over here without contracting you for at least five years. I'm down for five and they'll either do five or seven years. It's a bit odd because you sign the contract before you actually get the gig and you're left thinking. 'Did I do the right thing?', but then you think 'Well, I might not get it anyway'!

Q. The general consensus is that VR.5 is either going to be a huge smash hit a la The X-Files or a monumental failure. Do you have high hopes for the series?

A. Yes, obviously, but I'm a great believer now in what happens is meant to be. If it happens, it's because it's meant to be; if not, it's because either I'm not ready for it or I'm going to be into something else or something along those lines.

(© Copyright Cult Times, 1995).

Segments of article reproduced here with permission from Cult Times. Visit the Cult Times website.

Rysher Entertainment, FOX, et al. own VR5 and all characters there created.

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