Why Anthony Stewart Head’s Giles Left Buffy The Vampire Slayer

When it began airing in March of 1997 on The WB, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was a show that delighted in throwing its audience for a loop, starting with the title. For those who had neither seen nor heard of the 1992 horror-comedy of the same name, the show was an unexpected blend of supernatural action and high-school angst. On one hand, we have the Slayer, a person with almost inexplicable power and strength whose job is to keep the forces of evil at bay. On the other hand, that Slayer is a teenage girl named Buffy Summers who seems like she would be more at home on a cheerleading squad than she is in patrolling local graveyards to take down any members of the undead. (And, as would be made clear later on, Buffy doesn’t just seem like she’d rather be normal, she very badly wants to be normal.) 

After moving to the seemingly quiet and pleasant town of Sunnydale, California, Buffy soon realizes that it’s actually positioned on the edge of the Hellmouth, a kind of black hole or vortex that lures in all manner of beast that she and her eventual allies have to take down. (Check out our ranking of the best “Buffy” villains here.) Inevitably, Buffy makes new friends in high school, such as the besotted and loquacious Xander and the cheerfully nerdy Willow. One of Buffy’s most important relationships is with her Watcher, the man who serves as her teacher and mentor as she learns to use all of her powers as a Slayer. That Watcher is also the school librarian, Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head). But after the show’s fifth season, Giles became just a recurring presence. So why did Head leave the show that made him more recognizable in the United States? 

The answer was as simple as it was heartbreaking: he missed his family and was tired of the constant travel to Los Angeles from his home in the United Kingdom.

Although Giles was often a key supporting character instead of the main focus of each season of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he was a critical part of Buffy’s growth as a person and as a Slayer. Their close-knit relationship is used as creative fodder throughout the show. In fact, an early episode started with Giles being fired as Buffy’s Watcher because he’s too close to her. It also explains why Giles leaves the States behind a couple of years after she and her friends graduate high school. While they spend their first years in college, he ended up owning and running a local magic shop that served as a place for characters to hang out and discuss each week’s monster of the week.) The fact that Giles feels like more of a surrogate father to Buffy may be sweet and kind, but also means his choices as her Watcher are inevitably biased and may end up hurting her and other innocent people, leading him to depart the show outside of recurring guest appearances over the final two seasons.

It’s also painfully ironic, since while Giles saw himself as a father figure to Buffy, Anthony Stewart Head had an extremely hard time missing his own family from thousands of miles away. As he shared with The Guardian in 2016, “I can’t put into words how much I missed my family when I was in LA. Even now, I feel emotional about it.” Although his partner took care of the day-to-day parenting for their young daughters, Head struggled with the time away, often only getting to see them once every three to four weeks. “The production team would work dates around me, and every time I got the chance to have six days clear, I’d get on a plane.” But that wouldn’t be the same as being there every day, and Head acknowledged in the same interview that he would often sit in his car and weep out of sadness and frustration.

Even though Head doesn’t say as much in the interview, part of the issue also stemmed from the number of episodes in each season of an American drama like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Even an upstart network like The WB, with genre fare like “Charmed” and “Buffy” or teenage dramas like “Dawson’s Creek,” operated the way that most network fare typically did: the fall-TV season would be peopled with shows that produced 22 episodes a season (presuming that ratings were solid enough to merit full seasons). And that was the case for “Buffy” in six of its seven seasons. The first season premiered in March of 1997 as a midseason replacement, with just 12 episodes, but the following six seasons all aired 22 full episodes, even after the show made the jump to UPN for its final two years. The reality of most, though not all, network TV now is that shows often air no more than 20 episodes, and that’s only if they air full seasons, instead of arriving as mid-season drop-ins.

This detail is worth acknowledging, because it adds to the challenge Head noted about struggling to find six days in a row when he could travel back to England. The reality of making a TV show in the United States in the late 1990s and early 2000s was that if it succeeded and you were a regular, you would be working for a large chunk of the year, even if audiences only got to see the fruits of your labor for 22 hours in that same year. Though Head had appeared in some TV shows before “Buffy,” they were almost entirely British shows. (Head did make an appearance in an early episode of “NYPD Blue.”) British TV has always eschewed the American model, often airing somewhere between six and 13 episodes a year, and often not even the double-digit number. And while it’s true that Head was able to return more regularly to his family after turning into a recurring player in the sixth and seventh seasons of “Buffy,” he still appeared in a large chunk of those episodes; in the final season alone, he showed up in 13 of 22 installments.

It’s weirdly apropos that Anthony Stewart Head chose to leave behind his regular status on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to be with his family, considering that Giles leaves Sunnydale behind to ensure he’s keeping his own American loved ones safe by not being overly close to them. It was also arguably a logical choice to have Giles bid the Scooby Gang adieu, almost as soon as the show ended its third season. Fans of “Buffy” know that the third season climaxed not just with Buffy and the gang graduating, but in effect destroying the school (which sat directly on top of the aforementioned Hellmouth), to ensure that they could save the world from the transformed demonic mayor of Sunnydale. In short, when the fourth season of the show began, Giles no longer had a front where he could hide his secretive Watcher duties. Though Giles hangs around for the next two seasons, there’s a sense that the writers struggled to figure out what to do with the immensely if subtly talented Head, especially as Buffy has a crisis of conscience and winds up connecting with the magically created sister she never previously had.

Anthony Stewart Head was a vital and excellent member of the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” family, with his dry wit and odd-couple-style chemistry with Sarah Michelle Gellar and the rest of the young American cast. But as good as he was, his best days were when the other characters were still in high school. (Will Giles return for the recently announced sequel series? That’s a whole different can of worms, in part because the pre-existing comic series may cause some overall headaches in the continuity.) His leaving after the fifth season made perfect sense in retrospect, but almost could have happened sooner; it would have made some fans even sadder, but having the kids grow up without their mentor was a logical next step in their growth as characters.