Whedon-Approved

You can keep your Rat Packs, Brat Packs and Frat Packs – quite frankly, the coolest Hollywood clique to be a part of would have to be Joss Whedon's unofficial repertory company. Look over the multi-talented chap's body of work and you'll see a few names popping up regularly, whether in leading roles or eye-catching supporting parts. And one of those names is Tom Lenk.

Although he had a few credits to his name before first venturing into the Whedonverse (look, there's Tom as one of pornography's grungy stars of the future in Boogie Nights!), it was his performance as Andrew Wells, a member of the socially stunted, misogynistic and downright evil Trio, in Whedon's TV series, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, that really put him on the map as an actor.

Of course, Lenk has worked with other people over the course of his career – look for him in the first Transformers, for instance, or in Ben Affleck's Oscar-winning Argo – but he's formed a close friendship and a fruitful creative relationship with Whedon, appearing on the Buffy spin-off, Angel, and the big-screen projects The Cabin In The Woods and the modern day reinterpretation of Much Ado About Nothing.

It's these films and TV shows Lenk is often quizzed about when he attends pop culture conventions like Supanova, coming to Brisbane and Melbourne this April. “I do plenty of other work but it's not the kind of work that really connects or resonates with the convention crowd,” he smiles. “I don't know if there's an Argo convention. Maybe I could set one up for myself, call it 'Ben Affleck Adjacent'.”

It's actually been a fair few years since Lenk graced a convention but the lure of “going to cool places and meeting cool people” proved kind of irresistible. And he's looking forward to discussing his work, Whedon-related and otherwise, with fans.

He's especially talkative about last year's Much Ado About Nothing, which saw him play Verges, second-in-charge to Nathan Fillion's buffoonish police detective Dogberry. “I thought it was cool Joss cast me as a cop – it's not the type of role I would usually play,” he admits.

“Plus I am not the best at Shakespeare, I would say... Actually, let me take that back.  I'm okay at it but I do have a hard time with it. I have a lot of Shakespeare shame inflicted by teachers – in college, a friend and I took a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream and set it at a high school prom. We approached it in a pretty creative way, we thought, and the teacher just shut us down! We had to go back and make it boring. I should track that teacher down, shouldn't I?”