BtVS Magazine Datum: Januar 2002 James Marsters' character saw some major developments in Buffy the Vampire Slayers fifth year, as we learned how the aesthetic poet William was sired by Drusilla and turned into the rampaging monster we all love to hate. Meanwhile, in the present, he's become infatuated with Buffy and befriended the lost and confused Dawn. "To my mind, Spike has not changed," James maintains. "He's always been love's bitch, basically." James firmly believes that the fifth season saw an unusual. Evolution rather than a major change in the character. "If Drusilla had had a younger sister, Spike would have tried to save her in the same way, with the same depth of emotion that he did with Buffy's sister", he says. "That's what I thought was so attractive about the character to begin with: he had the contrast of being a really soulless vampire, but he was also truly in love. You saw a very romantic, tender side to him, even in the second year. I thought that the conflict and the tension between those two things within him was interesting. That's why he wasn't a flat, cardboard villain - he was a bad-ass, but he was so much in love. He was a real sweetheart to Drusilla. So that was interesting." Juliet Landau's prior film commitments meant she was unable to return in the show's third season, leaving Spike to reappear alone. "Then I hated my girlfriend, Harmony", James continues. "She was there to deflect my wrath for Dru, as always happens. Poor Harmony! She really got hers!" James feels that Spike has effectively come full circle. "He's back to where he was in the beginning, in a way", he states "He's screwed though, man, and he knows it too. He's in love with Buffy, but Buffy is never going to be in love with him. He's so beneath her." James has found it interesting witnessing Spike's recent developments, although he reveals that he hasn't had much input into the character's story arc. "It's interesting to work with a writer as he moves through his characters", he says. "And to some extent it's undeniable that as you become part of each other's lives, who I am becomes fodder to Joss's imagination. But it's not in my control." However, James notes that there have been elements of his performance that may have informed the way in which the writers have approached Spike. "If you go back to "School Hard", the first time I saw the Slayer I very consciously played the hunter, both sexually and violently. In that scene I'm looking at her thinking, 'I'm going to have you, and I'm going to kill you'. It's a leopard look. I'm like, 'Good going, Slayer, come on...' I play those scenes like a hunter, and I wonder to some extent if people picked up on that. I don't know if Joss did. "I don't have knowledge of what's happening in the next episode", James adds, referring to the show's production process. "Much less do I have control. I always try to keep a balance - when Spike does something really mean, I've always tried to give him a little warmth. I've always thought it was my job to keep the audience with the character. When your character sticks Buffy with a cattle prod, you really need to make sure the audience isn't going to think, "The hell with him!", and leave the character. I didn't want them to go off Spike at that point, which I thought they might. The bit with the cattle prod was over the edge." James has always gone out of his way to ensure that the audience doesn't forget that Spike is really not a nice guy, that he's not someone with whom you'd want to be intimate. "He's a monster", he admits, "but if he likes you, he'd be your monster, and he would protect you above all things. But he is a monster. I don't think women mind if he's a monster as long as he's their monster. Take note guys", he grins, "You can get away with anything as long as it's all for her! "I have no idea why Spike is sexy," James continues more seriously. "He's sexy because Joss tells me to play him as if he is. To me, Spike is a magic trick that I'm in on. I'm pulling some of the strings on that puppet, but there are a lot of other people manipulating that character, not just me. I like my part of it, and I'm proud of it. I love the character, but in a way when I'm looking at the TV show, he's not me. The character is defined by what he says, not how he says it. Spike is defined on the page - when you read a script, you can see that. However it is good to see that he's still sexy. Spike's relationship with Dawn has enabled more character development. I used to bite people, now I'm saving kids", James says ruefully. "But if you're in love with someone, everyone they love becomes important to you. And in a short amount of time, that becomes the relationship. Spike and Dawn got in contact with each other, so maybe he's not so bad, which of course means they must be setting me up for something. My mind just spins! I don't know what the hell they're up to. I never know what Joss is thinking, I really don't. Nor do I really want to any more. I just want to go through this experience. They've softened me so much that it's made me think I'm going to go evil. Spike's never the same two seasons in a row. Maybe they're going to have to kill me... I have no idea." But James is adamant that he enjoys working with Michelle Trachtenberg, aka Dawn. Kristine Sutherland has described how the young actress brought a new energy to the set. "She rocks as an actor!", he agrees enthusiastically. "She's great to work with. She's a total pro. She's so talented - it's so unfair! How dare she be that good! I wasn't that good at her age - I sucked when I was her age!" James recalls the emotion of that moment on the crane in the final episode of the fifth season, as Spike and Dawn realise that the vampire cannot help her. "You're going to die - I failed you", he explains. "I can't do anything to save you. They're going to stab you to death... sorry! It's interesting, because the inertia was carrying us at that point. We'd been running from Glory on the set for weeks, in pretty uncomfortable shooting conditions at times. It was sweaty, hot and dusty, and bad for weeks. Everybody knew it was the 100th episode, and everybody knew that it was the last time that Joss was going to be on the set every day. SO it was the end of a significant period of time on the show. In some ways, filming that scene was easy", he adds. "Joss came up there and we shot it a couple of times. He knows which moments are key, so he always makes sure that those are right. He gives more direction than any other director, certainly on film. Most directors are afraid to give direction. They're worried they're going to take you off and make you uncomfortable by asking you to act too much. But Joss knows what he wants from you without doing that." James very much enjoyed working on "The Gift". "I was 15 feet up in the air on this wicked metal staircase", he recalls "There were a lot of edges on that thing! Joel Grey [Doc] was great - he got called to the set at about 2.30am. He was tired, but he fought up there like a prince." Even an episode in which Spike didn't appear has James raving. "People were saying, 'someone's going to die on Buffy - can you tell me who?'", he recalls of his experiences at conventions in the weeks prior to transmission of "The Body", which saw the passing of Buffy's mother. "And they've have a little gleam in their eyes, like it was going to be fun seeing who died. And I was like, 'Yes someone is going to die, and you're going to wish you never got excited about that. We're going to kill you guys.' I was just phenomenal". James says of the episode. "It just made me more and more proud to be on the show. It's like, all bets are off. Just when you think you know what the show is, it's something completely different. I don't know if Joss is showing off, or just testing himself, but if you notice, with every episode that he's directed, Joss has stripped away one of his strong points. People used to say that his dialogue was the best - and then he did 'Hush', the silent episode. Then they said his plots were fabulous, and he did 'Restless', a dream episode with no narrative whatsoever. Then they said he was marvellously funny, and he came up with 'The Body', with not one joke or laugh in the whole thing. I don't know - what the hell is he going to do next?" James immediately answers his own question with comments on Season Six. "The musical episode, of course. He's on fire about that. We were out on the dance floor at a recent convention and he couldn't stop talking about it. It feels like his first job - he's so excited, it's like his first break as a writer. He's done the music, and it's fabulous. He still claims not to know how to play piano! He will not admit to being good." The actor is adamant that Spike did not belong within 100 miles of 'The Body'. "It was part of Buffy's journey that was not having to deal with vampires. The challenge was not vampires that day. That would have been horrible, and of course, that's why Joss didn't do it. The episode was marvellous. The visual language of the episode was very much like film - there weren't a lot of close-ups, there wasn't a lot of coverage. Joss obviously knew what shots he wanted: there were a lot of moving masters, and he incorporated a lot of figures of action. There was one incredible master shot: the foreground was the entire classroom, and the background was Dawn disintegrating as she heard the news. That was as good a shot as I have ever seen - I don't know how long he spent on that one." Working on Buffy is still an intensely physical experience for James. From his first day on the set, he's wanted to do as many of his own stunts as he can, learning moves from Steve Tartaglia, his stunt double, so that he can use them and increase the credibility of the fight sequences. "If my feet don't leave the floor, then it's basically me", he says. "There have been a couple of times when, frankly, I was a little tired and Steve went in. I thought they were going to wake me to do the shot, but they didn't. It's probably somewhere between 60-70 per cent me, and 30-40 per cent Steve. I love the fights." James' favourite sequence came in the flashback fight on the subway train in 'Fool For Love', when he disposes of his second Slayer. "That was a 15-hour fight day", he recalls. "I think Steve was in for maybe two shots, otherwise it was all me. The train wasn't actually on the move, it was being jerked around by teamsters, so that was pretty intense. But it made a little easier to fight than it looked. The woman who was playing the Slayer, April Wheedon-Washington, was really evil." That segment also showed how Spike obtained his distinctive coat. "Yeah, from the back of a dead Slayer", he says. "On one of my first entrances on the show, I wanted to rob the body of the guy I had just tagged. But the director saw Spike as an immortal prince and said he wasn't like that. I thought, 'no, Spike's a Sid Vicious - she's got a nice coat, just take it man!' So I was glad about him taking the coat. I always wanted to show Spike picking up off the bones of a dead body - the carrion", he smiles. "I always wanted to show him putting on his eyeliner and his makeup too", he laughs, "but I don't think we'll ever do that now. The time for that has come and gone." While James is enjoying working on Buffy, he would also be interested in crossing over to any new series currently in pre-production, particularly the UK-based Anthony Stewart Head series, Ripper. "That would be a good fit", he says. "Spike is British. I would love to come over here and do some. That would be a dream. I think that's a fabulous idea, harking back to Giles as Ripper. That's how I see him anyway - the rest is just a little bit of a show. I love seeing Tony with the baseball bat: I think that's where the character is. He's just being cool, because he's learned his lesson now, but underneath it all, he's just a bad-ass waiting to come out. Tony's wondering what weapons he's going to have. "As for the animated series", he continues "I don't know if Spike is going to fit in with that much. It's going to be the very early years. But I hope they let me voice it. I wouldn't want anyone else to touch the character, basically. I'm very possessive about him!" James' travels around the world have given him an insight into the way Buffy fans globally view Spike, and he's pleased to note that they all respond similarly. "Although in Britain they're better at expressing it", he adds "you guys know how to break the ice like nobody else. It's really nice, because it takes the pressure off meeting people." The actor is finding the downside to being what he describes as a 'cheesy celebrity'. When he visited Australia recently, he found that he could not travel around as much as he might have liked. "A magazine was apparently running a competition", he explains. "Whoever can find James Marsters gets a bunch of money. So there was a disinformation campaign running saying that I was on the other side of Sydney, when in fact I was at Darling Harbour. It was the most wonderful hotel, but I couldn't leave. I did go out one day and see a waterfall, which was cool. I want to go and see the world, but I would like to do it anonymously." He doesn't have the same problem at home. "In Santa Monica I am completely anonymous", he says. "People notice me, but I'm not really a celebrity. I'm not Leonardo Di Caprio, for God's sake! But when I go somewhere as a celebrity, it's announced that a celebrity is coming and everyone's looking out for you from all the hype. If I just go anonymously somewhere, I wouldn't get recognised. It's not like the Beatles in A Hard Day's Night or anything. AT a convention, I'm famous, but if I step outside, I wouldn't be. Also, in LA people are bored with actors. They're like 'Who cares if you're Dustin Hoffman? Get out of my way, I want gas!" James recently worked with Buffy writer Christopher Golden on the Spike and Dru comic book, recently released as a graphic novel, but has gone on record about disappointment at some elements of the end result. Although he still wants to continue working on the version of Macbeth that he has been toiling on since before he became part if the Buffy cast, he's aware that "when I go back to Buffy, there's not a lot of time. When you're at work, you're at work. Even if I'm in my trailer, psychologically I like to concentrate on one thing at a time. It's hard for me to split my attention, frankly." What free time James has is currently focused more on closely on music making. "I'm really into my guitar", he says, his face lighting up. "It's going well. I'll write whatever I'm thinking. 'You screwed me, I know you're going to hurt me. Go to hell.' or 'You're beautiful, I'm thinking about you all the time'." He also finds that music is an outlet for any frustrations he is feeling. James has also had the opportunity to jam onstage with Four Star Mary, the band who appear on Buffy as Oz's group Dingoes Ate My Baby. "That was fun", he laughs. "They're very good. They just turn my guitar up and give me lots of distortion! They're good guys, and I'm learning from them. Playing with a band is an entirely different thing from playing by yourself. With a band, the whole point is to keep exact rhythm, so you come in and out. You have to hit everything cleanly, or else you muddy the whole thing up and it disappears. When you're playing by yourself, you can just go with your own flow, and switch it up as much as you like." The trip to Britain allowed James to follow in the footsteps of some of the famous bands. "Four Star were at the Garage in Brixton [actually The Garage is in Islington - MM], and they were having such a tight set that I really didn't want to go up. I really try not to screw up their sets. But everyone was expecting me. It worked out pretty good though, I have to say. We did especially well on The Cars 'You're Just What I Needed', the old cover. We were going to do Cheap Trick's 'Surrender', but Cheap Trick had played there the night before and had performed 'Surrender', so we thought we'd be tempting fate!" Returning to Buffy, James reveals that he's genuinely pleased that the fans still want to see more of Spike. "We've basically turned the character in his head this year, and we risked flushing him down the toilet. When I found out that he was going to be a wuss, I was like 'Screw this!' but it's amazing.", he admits. "It's exactly what the producers were hoping for. So it's made the character much more complicated, sweet, pathetic, vulnerable and recognisable.