Angel Turns 25! How David Boreanaz Turned a Conversation ‘About Italian Restaurants’ into an Iconic TV Vampire (Exclusive)

“This was the ninth hour for them,” he recalled. “They need this character in four days. I read with them and thought, ‘Oh, I this is going to be horrible.’ But then it was, ‘Oh my God, I got through that,’ and then I got through the next phase, and I got the job.”

Boreanaz knows that his success on TV comes down to being able to have great first meetings, and then to also pitch ideas and do what he can to make them happen.

“I’m very quick and impulsive,” he said. “I literally can be in a room, and I could think of an idea, and I can take that idea, and I can pitch it to them, and we’d all be like, ‘Whoa, that’s amazing.’ It just happens. It’s like a flicker.”

Throughout his success with Buffy, Angel, Bones and later SEAL Team, he said he made sure not to let success ever get to his head.

“You have to be very self-aware,” he shared of becoming a successful actor. “You have to balance, and you can’t let the ego get out of control, and you feel like you just got to check yourself every day on that.”

But then, once he lands a job, he devotes himself fully to the work:

“I show up, and I show up as whole as I can, and there are days when I show up, and I’m not there, and I fall like everybody else. I’m a human,” he added.

“So you take your mistakes that you have sometimes with life, you learn from them, and you grow from them, and you become a better person. That’s just life, that’s the way it is. Just get back up, And show up.”