FOR an American actor, Alexis Denisof plays a pretty good Englishman. It was as an Englishman that he spent six years in two of television's biggest cult successes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.
He was Wesley Wyndham-Price, one of the Watchers whose job it was to guide and train the young slayer of vampires, Buffy Summers, a role he was to repeat in the spin-off series Angel.
Now he is in Liverpool preparing to play an American. Not that anything is easy in the world of theatre. Born in Maryland and raised in Seattle, it seems he has not got quite the right accent for the mid-American character he plays in Arthur Miller's All My Sons.
So, like his fellow actors in the Liverpool Playhouse production, he has a dialect coach to help him get it right.
Denisof is used to the confusion over his background, as he explains in his Playhouse dressing room: "If I was a dog I would be a mutt." He came to Britain to study drama as a young man and stayed for 15 years.
"My interest was in classical theatre so I thought Britain would be the right place to come," he says of the three years he spent at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and ended up in Hamlet. "I enjoyed that job playing Fortinbras, a chance to watch Mark Rylance playing Hamlet each night and some other great actors.
"I had a lot of fun in the West End in Tovarich, a French farce with Robert Powell, and I was in Rope in Chichester with Tony Head who would later be in Buffy, of course." But there was also a lot of television, including three episodes of Sharpe and a movie, Faith, which he filmed in Liverpool with Michael Gambon.
"It was the story of a scandal in Parliament and Michael and I were meant to be lovers, although neither of us has that particular inclination. We were constantly greeting each other with politically incorrect monikers whenever we saw one another and there was a lot of giggling in the intimate scenes!"
