Cinescape - Crossroads - März 2002


Upon meeting James Marsters, the actor behind "Buffy the vampire Slayer's" Sid Vicious-esque blood-sucker Spike, you're immediately struck with two realizations: He's not English and he doesn't bite. As off-putting as the character makes himself out to be, Marsters is quite the opposite. Chatty and down to earth, the modest actor is still a Northern California boy at heart, grateful for the opportunities his Buffy role has provided him-especially considering he was always the kid who didn't "fit in" while growing up.

"Very much like Spike, I was not comfortable with myself in my younger years," admits Marsters. "I was very much on the outside. I was the freak of Modesto."

After discovering punk rock music in Marin, Calif., having a spell in New York becoming an angry young lad, doing time at the Julliard acting school (he was kicked out-"They told me I could never be an actor and to stop trying"), and eventually forming his own repertory theatre companies in both Chicago and Seattle, Marsters ultimately found the place where he fits in best of all- Los Angeles.

"You're not freaky around here," Marsters says with a hearty laugh. "This is where the circus is. All the freaks come here and we discover we are beautiful. It's like this film Joss {Whedon, Buffy's creator,} showed me called Illuminata, which is about a group of actors, producers, directors and theatre people who are all freaks but who create beauty."

It's a particularly balmy winter's afternoon as Marsters arrives at an all-natural bakery in Santa Monica, Calif., for the interview. He's dressed casual, though his bleached blond Billy Idol hair is unmistakable, allowing for a couple of customers to instantly recognize him. However, Marsters admits that fans tend to be hesitant about approaching him.

"Luckily, I play a character that you don't f--- with, and so generally in life, I don't take people f-k--- with me," says Marsters. "I've gotten in a lot of trouble for standing up for that, actually."

Marsters laughs, aware that for a former outcast it's quite fitting he relish being the uber-outcast that Spike has become on the series. When it comes down to it, however, the actor has just as much William the Bloody (his character's more introspective, pre-vampire state) in him as he does Spike. In fact, his drink of choice on this day is hot English tea-an alternative to coffee, which he has been trying to wean himself off of.

"I do have good interactions with people daily," he adds. "Almost every time I go out someone says, 'Hey, good job.' Or, 'Hi, I saw the show." I have to say Buffy fans get it. They are fairly intelligent and hip to irony and metaphor. They don't take things literally. So I've really had no bad reactions with people, but, yeah, celebrity is generally not a healthy psychological state because everybody will tell you that you are great even if you are not - even if you are being a jerk. I've had to constantly surround myself with people who don't give a s--- about my celebrity and will tell me when I am being a jerk. An I am trying to live a very normal life so that I don't lose my keel in all this."

Much of Marsters' attitude stems from how fortunate he has been. A Hollywood nobody when he first auditioned and snagged the part of Buffy during Season Two, Pike and his vamping cohort Drusilla (Juliet Landau) became breakout characters as the season's "Big Bad."

"They had their backs against the wall," says Marsters. "They had been looking at a lot of people and didn't find anybody and decided to look a little lower in the talent barrel to lesser-known people - in fact, to people with almost no credits, like me, who was a theatre actor but who could do an accent."

Luckily the gamble paid off. The vampyric duo, scheduled for midseason termination, lasted the entire year with the Drusilla-less and heartbroken Spike popping back in town a season later. Better still, the character was turned into a full-time cast member by Season 4, but not without his fair share of growing pains.

"Buffy as conceived was a story of a young person trying to find {herself} - that adolescence where most people either really become themselves of fail to," says Marsters. "So Joss used vampires and demons as a sideshow and a metaphor so he could talk more directly about issues, and as an obstacle in the way of a person achieving their best self. And my character is a demon and evil. If you ever redeem my character, he will become as patsy."

Nonetheless, Spike has certainly continued to revel in his outsider statues, even though in Season 4 a computer chip was placed in his head by a government operation called The Initiative, which in effect neutered the once ferocious vamp. He no longer could harm humans (though he still can kick demon ass).

"Spike was not planned," admits Marsters. "He was not part of the original concept at all. In some way, he threatens it and in some ways he just spins off in his own interesting way. So when Joss wanted me to be a part of the cast, of course I say 'yes,' but at the same time in the back of my mind, I didn't know if it would work. Joss wanted me to be the new Cordelia because there needs to be someone in the Scooby gang saying, 'You are all stupid and we are going to die, this sucks.' That's how you keep it from really becoming Scooby-Doo. That's how you keep it from being, 'Gosh, guys, let's go get the monster again.'"

Yet as much as they tried to fashion Spike into the new Cordelia, it ultimately didn't work. Anya {Emma Cauldfield}, the former Vengeance Demon-turned-mortal (and now Xander's bride-to-be), ultimately filled that void.

"They found out very quick that Spike couldn't really be that," says Marsters. "He couldn't hang out with the gang because of the sunlight. You see me in the very beginning of my tenure as a regular in Season 4 lurking over in the corner of Giles' apartment throwing out a lot of zingers, or they would ties me up a lot. They were trying to figure out a way to get me the hell in the story. They found that I couldn't be the Cordelia, but what the hell was I?"

Eventually, something even more surprising happened - Spike suddenly became one of the most fascination characters on the show. Literally defanged, he tried committing suicide, became infatuated with Buffy- and even had Warren Meers build him his very own Buffy-Bot when the Slayer did not reciprocate his affections. The arc of the character suddenly became this widely unpredictable mechanism in the Buffy universe that proved to be even more human and fallible than some of the human characters themselves. And this season with Buffy back from the grave and feeling out of place, she's finally shacked up with Spike in what can be considered the ultimate love/hate relationship.

"I've essentially become the metaphor for heroin for Buffy," says Marsters with a smile, though he cautions this is his interpretation of what's happening with the characters and not anything creator Whedon or executive produces Marti Noxon has explained to him "You have to remember something important - I can be very forthcoming in interviews, because I don't' ask what's going to happen next. I have never gone to the office and said, "What's going on with Spike? Why are we doing this? What's happening? It's all my interpretation. I don't know if I'm going to hang onto Buffy. I don't know if she's going to dump me in the next script. So that having been said, it seemed to me right when Buffy and I kissed and the very next episode {that} I leave her in the lurch. I mean that's kind of f-ked up for a boyfriend to do to his girl. What an a-hole. I started thinking, "Wow, he hasn't changed.' So when I got the next script, the one where Willow goes to Rack, who is a metaphor for a drug dealer, and she gets semi-molested by him in order to get the magic/spells, that structurally the script has a mirror of that with Buffy struggling with her own addiction to Spike."

That said, Marsters admits he is still curious where everything is heading with Spike and Buffy's rough and tumble love.

"I think he's deeply in love with Buffy, but that's what I think in my little universe," says Marsters. " And what I think is interesting is that it can go two ways. He could wither and be driven to acts of great heroism as he is going now, or is she completely rejects him and continues to be horrible to him, he could really get scorned as lovers do and become quite cruel. So dramatically it can go either way. There's rocket fuel in both directions. And knowing Joss and Marti, it will probably go both ways."

One aspect of the show that continues to surprise Marsters is the abundance of material he has to work with. He admits that much of that has to do with his character being a creature of the night.

"Being a vampire is both good and bad," says Marsters. "It's good because they can't make Spike hump the plot around. He just cannot be around too much to figure out who's got the gem and where to get this and who to go to for that, because he can't be in daylight and it would be too ridiculous to have him walking around in a smoking blanket all the time. So he is forced into the shadows by the fact that he's a vampire. He walks into the darkness, which means I am a dab of color rather than a main character who you are going to experience the story with. I'm not a hero. The heroes are the daylight characters, and those are the people the audience wants to be. I am not one of those."

Yet the quality of writing, as the series approaches the halfway mark of its sixth season, still manages to achieve levels many shows only dream about. This year, for example, Whedon wrote and directed the much-talked - about musical episode, which allowed each character to express their innermost secrets through song. It could have been Cop Rock; instead it was pure Buffy magic.

"We didn't know what we were filming from day to day," says Marsters of the hectic schedule. " We basically filmed four and a half episodes in a three-episode schedule. They were having splinter units, second units, third units. They just crammed them in the corners. So we just worked harder and scheduling-wise it was all up in the air. But basically it was a question of where there is a will there is a way, and everyone was willing to work a lot harder because we knew we were doing something special. We just found the time even though there was not time to find."

And while singing on the show might have scared most actors, Marsters was ready. He already plays a number of Los Angeles clubs-just him and his guitar a la his idols Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan- and Whedon made sure to test everyone's vocal range so that each song was written to the actors' strengths.

"{Whedon} writers 24-chord songs, so they're kind of hard to learn, but it was easy for me to rehearse the song and make it my own because I learned it on my guitar," says Marsters " I just plugged in the amp and I really felt like I owned the song by the time I recorded it. The hardest thing for me was lip-synching. I was not that bad, but it just meant extra takes. Some people were good at lip-synching and some people weren't. I was medium. Sarah, of course, was perfect. She's perfect at everything. She buried everybody. God, it makes me crazy."

In the grand scheme of things, having the musical episode so early in the season (episode 6 to be exact, if you count the two-hour season premier as two episodes) could have meant it would be downhill from there, but writer Rebecca Rand Kirshner produced the stellar "Tabula Rasa" script as the follow-up, taking the show into grand farce when a spell by willow goes awry, making everyone forget who they are. Trying to put the pieces together, the characters begin rediscovering themselves- and their relationships to everyone else. Spike, kidding out from a loan shark in a suit and bow ties, thinks he's actually "Randy," Giles' son- since both have English accents.

"After the previous episode, what a nice relief amnesia would be at that point," says Marsters. "So it was great to see the characters having fun with each other and not so crushed by events."

Still, the cast was fried by the time "Tabula Rasa" came around and even Marsters thought it was going to be a horrible episode, but he says director David Grossman felt differently. Grossman was confident the cast was still on a high from the musical episode and that their timing was better than ever.

"We all went into that episode thinking it wasn't going to work, but director David Grossman knew," says Marsters. "It was a difference between being subjective about the experience, which is what we are paid to do, and watching it as an objective viewer. You could see what was happening and what was happening was quite wonderful. The last third of the episode really plays as farce, complete with bow ties, mistaken identities, changing sexual partners. The only thing we really didn't have in the last act was a bunch of different doors we would come in and out of.

"An to do all of this requires almost a musical timing, and we had been given that by the musical. We were hearing the best without even knowing it. We were functioning on a high level and we weren't even aware of it."

With the writing still at the top of its game, Marsters says there are only really two downsides to the show. The first: dying his hair.

"Every 10 days I do it, but pain is interesting," he says moving closer to accent his point. "If you repeat it enough, it just becomes another experience."

The other bummer is the night shooting, though he says with a smile, "That's the downside of being a vampire. You can't be counted to show up on the daytime, but the bad thing is you will always be there at night. Four o'clock on Friday-that's always my shots. The last shots of the week."

And even with the fortunate circumstances of landing on a hit cult show like Buffy, bad habits do form. Purging his system of his coffee addiction by drinking tea is one- quitting smoking after seven years was another.

"You realize at some point that you miss running and being able to take the stairs," says Marsters. " I had quit for a long time and then started smoking again when I got Spike. Joss, that goddamn bastard- my life went to hell after I met him."

As for solving the problem of still smoking on the show, Marsters says he drags on "these horrible herbal cigarettes." And that's not the worst of it.

" The worst thing about doing nude scenes is there is no place to put the {nicotine} patch anywhere, so right when you need it the most, you can't have it," he says. "Why are you edgy, James?' "Argg, never mind."

Waking up on the wrong side of the dead has never been more fitting both on screen and off, but Marsters wouldn't have it any other way. Having run two repertory companies, he's still interested in being involved on the producing side of the business, and even directing sometime down the road.

" I have a lot to learn about the film language before I direct, but I feel like I am starting very much to learn how to write for film," he says. " And learning how to act for film was a big lesson for me. Watch my earlier performances and they are often quite chilly, so I've learned to calm down and keep more secrets."

Since Marsters is not carrying the entire series, he's found time to guest star on the syndicated hit Andromeda, as well as an episode of VH1's Anthology series Strange Frequencies. Recently, he starred opposite Amber Benson in her directorial debut Chance. He's also been pursued by the studios for film roles, and reveals he just lost out of a major film villain.

"There would have been lunchboxes with my picture on it-action figures, everything." He says. " I asked them if they wanted me to audition with an English accent and they told me, 'No'. It came down to me and one other person and they cast an English guy. Go figure."

Nonetheless, Marsters rolls with the punches. Even Buffy's move from the WB to the UPN has proven to be a blessing in disguise for the actor.

"The WB was constantly saying, 'Don't do that, it's too much, it's too dangerous,'" he says. "They did a great job frankly, but the thing is Joss never wanted it to be only for kids. He never thought of Buffy as that kind of show. And now it's kind of wonderful that as Buffy grows older, we've gone to a network that is interested in an older audience and the issues can be more adult. The who is going to get really dangerous. What I am most excited about frankly is we are going to start to really offend people."

And don't worry about the trust old bloodsucker going MIA any time soon, either-yes, he's contracted for next season ("Oh yeah, baby, they've done me right-I'm here,") he says and he reveals he's accomplished something most TV actors only dream of.

"What TV actor in the fifth year of a job or of a series can say that they're not bored, but I'm not," he says. "Who has the honour of being terrified by the challenge of a story to tell. Joss opened me up in a way I didn't want to tell people about. He made me go places I didn't want to go. And that's just beautiful and dangerous. That's right where you want to be as an artist and a storyteller. I will never forgive him or I'll never be able to repay him for doing that."