How Sweet It Is
David Boreanaz would be the first to admit that he owes his career to Bertha Blue. She is not his agent, manager, acting coach or even personal stylist: she's his pet pooch. The actor was walking her in Los Angeles a couple of years ago when he was spotted by a talent agent who urged him to audition for a new TV series. He did and won the role of Angel, a 240-year-old friendly bloodsucker, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Two things about Mr. Boreanaz initially impressed Buffy's creator, Joss Wheedon: he was an unknown and thus cheap; and he had "something."
"After he finished his screen test, all the women were shaking," Mr. Wheedon recalls.
As the tortured, repentant vampire boyfriend of Sarah Michelle Gellar's heroine, Mr. Boreanaz has brought a Heathcliff-like presence to teen-agers' bedrooms across America. So when the powers that be decided Buffy's fan base could support a spinoff series, Mr. Boreanaz was the obvious choice to lead the new show.
The 29-year-old Mr. Boreanaz actually hails from a show-business family of sorts - his father is a TV weatherman in Philadelphia. After studying cinema and photography in college, where he managed to find time for exactly one drama class in four years, he drove to Hollywood aiming to make it as an actor.
Before that auspicious walk with Bertha Blue, his career had hardly been flourishing. His most high-profile appearance had been a guest spot in the sitcom Married . . . with Children, and he was far from a being a hot number on his agent's speed dial.
He had even resorted to drastic measures to get ahead. "I'd put on a suit and pretend I was an executive just to get into studio lots," he says. "I'd pass out resumes and talk to people. In one agency, the security chased me out of the buildings."
Now, Mr. Boreanaz's vita is welcome in all the right places. He took advantage of his summer break from filming Angel to star in a movie for the first time. In Valentine he plays a charming yuppie who wreaks revenge on a quartet of woman, including Denise Richards, who had humiliated him a decade earlier in college.
