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Nicholas Brendon - Interviewed at the Buffy soundstage August 23rd 2001
Big Brother
Working with twin Kelly on The Replacement
It’s glorious really. I just got back from England and I learned that word, ‘glorious’. It was a lot of fun. He’s my little brother so I love him very much, It was nice to teach him the ropes of the job that I do, which is performing in front of a camera and entertaining millions of people across this great, vast universe of ours.
He was really appreciative. He’s my best friend, so spending that much time together every day… (deadpans) we’re not friends any more. Regardless of that, it was a lot of fun.
It’s good to talk
Nick tells how overcoming his stutter led to acting and becoming spokesperson for The National Stuttering Foundation.
It was a challenge. I had a stutter ‘till… I still do today. I just work on it a lot. I obsess, if you will, with it, but I stuttered throughout my childhood.
I was playing baseball [and] when I quit playing I needed something else to do to occupy my time, because idle hands, the devil and stuff… So, I just talked to God and challenged myself, because talking in front of one person, much less than thousands of people terrified me.
So, I just decided to take the challenge. When you stutter, a lot of it is [that] you’re afraid you’re not being heard or you’re afraid that you’re being judged. I decided to take both and take my talents - as little as they were at the time - to Hollywood and get beat up for a while.
Working with the NSF, we’ve gotten a lot of letters and it’s reached a lot of the younger kids because I’ve been the youngest spokesperson so far, to date, I guess it reached out and touched a lot of people.
Fired Up
The one job prior to his acting career that Nick wasn’t fired from.
Well, there’s this one of course. It’s funny, when you become an actor and you’re successful, they don’t want to talk about acting any more. "Hey let’s talk about that stuff you were fired from.".
It was at a restaurant here in town, and I wasn’t fired because the general manager of the restaurant liked me a lot and I was auditioning and I booked this job. I was only there for three months, so had I been there longer and hadn’t booked this job I’m sure I would have been fired.
After [the audition] we had about eight months before we went into production. I’d asked for my job back there and I didn’t get it back, so I wasn’t fired, but I wasn’t re-hired. She let me have the job knowing that I was probably going to be doing something, so even that was… it’s touchy there, you know.
Superpowers
Xander instantly gained military knowledge. Anything you’d like to instantly learn like that?
I would like to have the superpower of being able to touch a book and then gain all the knowledge out of that book without spending hours and days reading it. You go into a library and you just start touching… that would be great for me. So, it’s a knowledge thing. I’m just easy, that’s all it is. I’m just lazy.
Once in a lifetime
In The Replacement, Anya worried that she had so little time left and so many things she wanted to do. Is there one particular thing you feel you must achieve in your life?
I don’t know if I can say. There are so many …
I wish that my brain would slow down long enough to pick one thing. My brain is just always going and going and going. I want the will to stop and say "Do that".
There are so many things. There’s travelling and learning foreign languages, flying an aeroplane. Picking one thing would I think be an injustice for the other things that I want to do, so that’s hard to answer.