RIPPER still a slim possibility, Head says

Joss Whedon first started talking about the Buffy spin-off Ripper way back in 2001, and the project has been in limbo ever since. Ripper would follow the adventures of Buffy's Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) after he left Sunnydale and returned to his native UK to try and start his life over. Head will soon appear in the US/UK co-production Merlin as King Uther, and in a new interview with SCI FI Wire he says that while things don't look too promising for Ripper, the project isn't quite dead.

"I actually introduced Joss to Julie Gardner, who was the executive producer on [Merlin] with the BBC," Head said. "She has long wanted to do something with the project. There are obviously complications with Ripper, because there are lots of tie-ins. There's Fox, there's the Kuzuis [who own the rights to Buffy], there's all sorts of stuff. Basically, it isn't just the simple question of Joss making a series that he wants to make. As far as anything concerned with Buffy, there are a lot of people down the line that would have a say. That's part of the equation, but we were sort of talking about what we might do with it. Pretty much at that point he had this conversation with Eliza [Dushku about Dollhouse], and the rest is history, for the moment."

Head that the Ripper plans have evolved over the years.

"Originally, when he pitched it to me, it was a series, and it was Giles as this sad, lonely man in England without a real reason to be," Head said. "It was pretty much ghost stories. Week by week, some ghost story would somehow affect him. Then he said he didn't want to. By that time, I think he had been affected by Angel, the need to write a weekly story. I think he found at that point the drive was different, so he suggested this one film that we were going to make. He told me this story that he had written, and it's absolutely beautiful, and I hope that one day it gets made, whether it's in the guise of Ripper or whether we just tell it as a one-off TV movie. It's a lovely, lovely story. It's kind of a ghost story. It's also about a man investigating his own soul, and it's fascinating, lovely, sad, and it's classic Joss Whedon. I hope we get to make it one day. From there on in, if it was successful, maybe he could have been convinced to do a series. As I say, now he's back in the seat of doing a weekly series with Dollhouse; maybe he can be convinced otherwise. Never say never, but at the same time, I think it's on a shelf for a while."



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