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:: JULIE MADLY DEEPLY ::

She may be Angel's jilted ex-Iover, Julie: Benz explains, but we shouldn't hate her for that. It's just she loves him too much - or so the Angel star tells Steve O'Brien...

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"I WANT TO BE IN THE WATCHER SERIES! I WANNA be in the cartoon! I wanna be in everything Joss Whedon does! " bellows the dinky Julie Benz into the dinky dictaphone. She giggles afterwards. Okay, we've kind of manoeuvred her into this act of thespian whoring. We've built SFX up big time. The rumoured Watcher series (following Giles after his return to England) looks likely to be set in our home city of Bath, and we've told her Joss reads the mag (true). But she hasn't heard anything about the supposedly imminent Buffy The Vampire Slayer cartoon series, bar that it's happening. As a first season Buffy star, she's certainly allowed in there, but as yet - no overtures from Joss. "I'd love to be in it," she coos. "I'd love to see how they'd draw me!"

29-year-old Julie Benz is exhausted. She's just spent eight and a.half hours on a plane from New York with only an hour to paint her face and change her clothing. If she's frazzled, she doesn't show it. "I'm much more crazy and neurotic now about flying with all the extra precautions, so I give myself an extra three or four hours," she confesses, turning down the offer of a coffee perk-me-up. "But I find that everybody's very willing to stand in line and be searched and go through security."

Julie Benz has just spent four days relaxing in New York. She went to university there and was present for Osama Bin Laden's previous assault on the World Trade Centre in 1993. She missed the 11 September dramas by the skin of her pretty nose.

"I was actually in New York right before, and I came back on 7 September. But I was trying to change my flight to 11 September to come back, so I could hang out a couple of extra days with my husband [actor John Kassir]. I had this photoshoot to do and they wouldn't change the date, so I had to fly on the Saturday, thank God! Someone was looking out for me.

"I was in LA when the attack happened," she remembers. "My husband was in New York. My mother called me actually at 6.30am. I picked up the phone and she went, 'New York's under attack, call your husband!' and I'm like, 'Mom, are you doing drugs? What are you talking about?' So I called my dad and asked, 'What's going on with mom. She's saying some weird stuff,' and my dad explained to me what happened. At that point, I tried to reach my husband and I couldn't get through. He finally contacted me on a payphone. I just never thought the towers would come down. It's sad when you drive into New York and the skyline's completely changed."

So what is New York like now? How much of a broken city is it? "When you're uptown it almost feels like business as usual, although it's not as crowded," she reveals. "There's still traffic and stuff, but there aren't as many tourists. The further downtown you go, it kinda takes your breath away. Every time you see a fire truck or police officers or you pass a fire station you just stop."

We're having this discussion in the lobby of a colossal hotel in Heathrow. Julie Benz is in England for a convention the following day and has Sky and The Big Breakfast pencilled in after us ("Is that the one where they ask you questions on the bed?" she asks, sweetly). Rob, the photographer, waves to us, indicating he's ready. " Are you not tired?" I ask. "God, yes," she answers. "I feel like I'm working Angel's hours." She often works all night on Angel, sometimes getting home at 7am. " And we shoot at the most glamorous locations in Los Angeles," she adds sarcastically. "We were just shooting in this alley and if I could bottle the scent of urine..." She trails off. "And the rats were like the size of a small Yorkie dog. It was a real crack alley."

She lounges on the sofa and tries not to fall asleep as Rob weaves his magic. Snap! Perfect. Snap! You're looking great, dear. Snap! You're floundering, Julie. Rob reloads the camera. And relax...

Julie Benz originally auditioned, like seemingly every other teen and twentysomething, for the role of Buffy back in 1996. "I didn't really feel I was right for it at the time," she says, shuffling on the sofa. "But that's how I met Joss - and that's how I got Darla. I mean, I think everyone in town auditioned for Buffy. Sarah [Michelle Gellar] had originally been cast as Cordelia, but when they couldn't find anyone, she finally convinced them to let her audition for Buffy." They ought to do an episode where everybody swaps roles... "We actually would love to do an episode where we swap jobs with the crew," she laughs, "where I'm like the focus-puller for the day!"

In her post-Buffy, pre-Angel period, Benz spent at least one year playing Kathleen Topolsky, an enigmatic guidance counsellor to the juvenile extra-terrestrials, in Roswell. In what's proving to be a pleasant pattern in her career, the character was originally only written for a few episodes, but then she was asked to return for more. "I did my first two episodes and they said, 'We want to hire you for a couple more,' so we did a couple more," she says. "Then they said, 'Could you do some more?' and I did, but then I got a movie and I had to leave. They said, 'When you've done the movie, would you come back?'"

And the actress playing Topolsky wasn't given any hint by the writers or producers as to what her character's true motivations were.

"It was challenging to be in a situation where I couldn't put any spin on the ball, where it wasn't clear what she was," remembers Benz. "I had no idea and they had no idea. What I found amazing was that all the fans were reading so much into her, into what she was. I read on the net one night some woman said that every time I'd come on the screen they'd throw things at the TV and hiss at me! I always thought Topolsky was good. I always felt that she didn't want the kids to be harmed in any way, so I was surprised to find out people thought she was evil."

Ah, another recurring theme of Julie Benz's life. She's very defensive of her two main telefantasy characters. She really doesn't see either Topolsky or Darla as bad, and seems authentically bruised by a seeming consensus in the Buffy community that Darla is a pernicious presence in Angel's life. When Darla returned to Angel, human and hurt and scared, we argue that for once she had sympathy on her side, but Benz seems reticent to believe even this. "I dunno. They still hate me," she whimpers. "People hate Darla. I don't understand why. I don't get it. Everyone always thinks she's trying to manipulate and she's not.

"A lot of the fans, they give Darla a hard time over the Buffy/Angel relationship, and what they don't realise is that Darla is the jilted ex-wife that will never get over Angel. He's moved past her, she hasn't moved past him, so therefore they choose not to like Darla because... " She trails off and seems to have a momentary epiphany. "Oh, I guess I'm doing my job if they don't like her..." But most actors relish playing roles that provoke boos and hisses from the audience. Julie Benz, though, seems just to want to be liked.

"Oh, I take it personally," she says in her coyest little , girl voice. "When you're out and some stranger comes up to you and says, 'God, I hate you,' and you get psycho mail, it's hurtful." So why this compulsion to scour the net checking up on what people are saying about you? Isn't it masochism? "You know what it is? Instant feedback," she stresses. "But then you always read that one where it says, 'I hate Julie Benz; her voice annoys me.' It hurts, because you're attacking me - that's my voice! You try living with this voice 24/7. But I try to look at the perspective of the person saying that - who is often confusing Darla for me. Some guy out there once said I couldn't act my way out of a paper bag and, you know what, I don't criticise your job, so please don't criticise mine. I felt like going on as myself sometimes, but then I thought, 'Would they even believe it was me and would it accomplish anything?' People have a right to their opinion and if they don't like me, they don't like me. It's up to me not to read it."

With Darla now pregnant with Angel's child (sorry, spoiler-phobes), it looks like Julie Benz is committed to Angel for a good while yet. Good job, too. She's amazingly proud of the character. "I love playing someone as rich as Darla is. To me, it's a story about love, a story about a woman who can't get over losing her man. She's a really damaged character. You don't find a character like her on television. I mean, she's 400 years old. In fact, I think I'm the oldest character on TV! " Angel's established the use of flashbacks to give substance to Angel and Darla's backstory, but there are still missing chapters from these death-crossed lovers' lives. Aside from being a parry for the costume designers, such a move would surely be a good way to flesh out their histories? Does she ever wonder where Darla was in the '20s, '40s or '50s, for instance? Benz smiles. "I think in the '60s and '70s, she was one of the Andy Warhol girls, and was part of the whole Studio 54 thing with the glitterpants. That was her scene. And the orgies that were going on, she probably put that idea in everybody's head. Darla was probably into that."

Oh. My. Lord.

And now Darla's pregnant, of course. Benz has never had children herself, and so has relied on her mother and sister to brief her in the various heaven and hells of pregnancy: the morning sickness, the hormonal outbursts... "But at the same time," she stresses, "she's part human and part animal. She's not just human pregnant, she's vampire pregnant, so you can't just play her as human pregnant. She's doesn't comprehend it."

Regularly playing a vampire takes time in the make-up chair - sometimes as much as four hours in Benz's case. What does she do during that time? "It depends what time in the day it is," she smiles, still fighting that overwhelming fatigue. "Sometimes you're thinking about what you've got to shoot that day. But if it's like 3am you just go to sleep." No worries about snoring, then? "Nah. They'll wake you up if you're snoring."

During her Buffy wilderness years, Benz also auditioned for a role in Stanley Kubrick's final opus Eyes Wide Shut. Not actually in front of the great man himself, but on videotape. "What happened was that I auditioned and then for my callback I was told I'd have to take my top off and do it topless. At that point, I decided no. You don't know who's going to be watching this tape. I've got nothing against doing nudity in the film once I'm hired, but to do it for an audition... I mean, I had no idea what the movie was about. They didn't tell us anything. When I saw the movie, I understood why it was important. But I've no regrets. If the deciding factor is what my tits look like, that's not why I got into this business."

On a more positive note, it was at this time that Benz got to work with the mighty Jack Nicholson in the Oscar: winning As Good As It Gets, playing a fluffy-headed and thoroughly awed receptionist. She's said in interviews before that she hero-worshipped the hexagenarian ladykiller and regretted him not "hitting on her". So, why ! Mrs Benz, didn't you hit on him? "Oh, because you don't know what territory you're gonna tread on," she laughs. "He's a big movie star I just thought he hits on everybody, I thought he could hit on me and then he didn't! But I think he thought I was really young, maybe he thought I was like 16... And I don't really think I'm his kind of woman. He likes them much more sophisticated. But he was wonderful, kind and generous. And I was just in awe and somewhat in love."

And so, Jules, if we went to your house right now, ! would your video of that film be stopped at that scene? "Oh, I watch everything but my scene!" she squeals. "I get embarrassed by that. Not by the movie, because it's awesome, but it's probably the scene in which I've been at my most vulnerable. I mean, I'm not acting in that scene. That's how I feel about Jack Nicholson. I'm a goofball like that!"

Rob's beginning to buzz round us, snapping Benz as she talks. Despite the rapidly escalating jetlag, she's not : overly fazed. But as the interview winds down (we've had a generous hour), she begins to mentally prep herself for the imminent convention. The irony strikes that to a couple of thousand people attending the event, she's as big a star as Jack Nicholson - and will certainly get a few spluttering, acned acolytes swarming around her feet.

"I do find it odd," she smiles sleepily. "It's weird to me. I try to put them at ease, though. I forget people watch television and watch the show and look up to you. I'm just a regular girl ftom Pittsburgh. I never use it to try to get a better table at a restaurant. I don't think of myself in that way. We're not curing cancer, you know." SFX

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