A stage-trained actor who is at his best when a part starts stiff and is allowed to loosen. Alexis Denisof took one Joss Whedon television character from joke to something far darker and, in Much Ado About Nothing, needed half an hour to become a fine Benedick.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the eavesdropping scene in Much Ado About Nothing (2013). Alexis Denisof's Benedick is hiding in a garden while his friends discuss, loudly and for his benefit, how much Beatrice loves him, and he does press-ups. It is business that would land from the back of a theatre and looks like mugging from three feet away, which is where Joss Whedon's camera is. We winced, and then, about half an hour in, we forgot we had winced, because Denisof stopped trying to be funny and started listening to Amy Acker. From then on the pair are as good a Beatrice and Benedick as we have seen on screen in years. That is the shape of most of his best work: a man who arrives stiff and is slowly let off the hook.
He trained at LAMDA and worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and both are audible in the way he handles text. Most people met him as Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, first on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1999), a replacement Watcher written to be laughed at, then on Angel (1999–2004), where across a hundred episodes the character was rebuilt from comic relief into someone capable and morally complicated. We have not reviewed either programme, so we will not judge the performance at length here, but that arc is the reason he has a reputation at all, and the reason Whedon kept casting him. Denisof has said of the road from Buffy to Shakespeare that "they’re not that far apart", and the garden scene bears him out.
Whedon is the collaborator who gets the best out of him; they have made five things together, Acker has been alongside him for two. The rest of the CV is supporting television and small film parts: Sandy Rivers, a news anchor on How I Met Your Mother (2006 onwards), where his comic timing is used more plainly and works better; The Other in The Avengers (2012), a part he played again in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). Between the end of Angel in 2004 and the Whedon films there were quiet years, and even his admirers would struggle to say what he did in them.
What works is the precision of a stage actor, the accents, the consonants, the sense that he knows exactly where a line ends, and the slow release from stiffness into feeling once a director trusts him with it. What does not work is the first half hour of almost anything, when the effort shows, and a habit of playing comedy at a volume the camera does not need. On stage that volume is the job. On film Whedon eventually talks him down; not every director has bothered.
If you know him only as a face in two Marvel films or a news anchor in a sitcom, watch Much Ado, on a sofa, beside someone who will argue about him afterwards. He is good. Give him half an hour.
Biography
Alexis Denisof is an American actor. He trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and began his career in British theatre, including work with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
He is best known for his role as Wesley Wyndam-Pryce in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1999) and its spin-off Angel (1999–2004). Denisof has appeared in films including Much Ado About Nothing (2013) as Benedick, The Avengers (2012) and Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) as The Other, and First Knight (1995). He has also had recurring roles in How I Met Your Mother (2005) as Sandy Rivers and Grimm (2011) as Viktor Beckendorf. He is married to actress Alyson Hannigan.
