http://www.dumb-inc.co.nz/delusions/articles/james12.html

buffy's bad boy
by Ian Spelling

TV Zone November 2001

He might be defanged, but he still has some bite. James Marsters tells us why Spike wants to jump the Slayer's bones...

    Acting out the final grief-driven moments of The Gift - Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Season Five cliffhanger, in which Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) sacrificed herself to spare her sister Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg) and quite possibly the whole planet from a date with death - proved far less challenging than James Marsters ever expected. "It was easy," notes the actor, who's spent the last four seasons sinking his teeth into the role of the vampire Spike. "I've never played a character for this long. I'm used to doing stage, where you live with a character for a maximum of about four months. After five years, there really is a space somewhere in my soul where Spike and Buffy really do live. There really is a Sunnydale inside me somewhere. So when Buffy really was dead and I really was Spike it wasn't hard at all to break down. It was crushing. That's the weird thing about acting, man. We're not insane, but we're paid to use our imaginations as fully as we can. So somewhere down inside my heart there is a Spike and a Buffy and he's very much hoping that he'll get a little bit more time with Buffy."
    Gellar, to be sure, is the star of the series and to put a fine point on matters, she's not going anywhere. How the character of Buffy will be resurrected remains a mystery, as does how she'll be brought back to the real world. The betting money in rumour-ville is that Willow (Alyson Hannigan), using her increasingly strong skills and power as a witch, will do the deed, but at a price: the buzz is that she'll be the season's main villain. There's also talk that it won't happen right away, but rather that the Buffy-bot will return to fight evil for a while before the real Buffy Summers picks up stakes once again. As for good old Spike, he'll try to help the Scooby Gang, but it remains to be seen if they'll accept his assistance. After all, Spike is a killer and series creator and producer Joss Whedon never seems to lose sight of this fact.
    But ask James Marsters about upcoming sixth season arcs - the current Season Six kicked off October 2 on UPN - and he's hellishly vague. "I don't know," he says. "I don't know. When I came on the show as a regular (beginning in Season Four after first appearing on the show as a guest star in Season Two's School Hard) I really assumed that the major arcs would be laid out to you at the start of the season and that things would be talked about. What I learned is that these guys are tap-dancing as fast as they can. It's impossible to tell an actor what the upcoming arcs are because they really might change. And I have stopped asking. I really don't know what's going to happen for Spike. It might be possible for me to find out, but, for me, Spike doesn't know what's going to happen, so why should I? I found out that Meryl Streep reads a script one time and that's it. When she goes into a film, she doesn't even remember where this scene fits into the movie. That's not her job. Her job is just to be real in the moment. And so, as I told Joss two years ago, I have embraced sloth and ignorance. I think I'm getting it. He almost went into a blind panic, of course, because he didn't understand me. But, like the rest of us, I wait to find out what the new adventure is every week, except that I'm about four weeks ahead of the audience."
    Fair enough, but what about Drusilla (Juliet Landau)? Will dear, beloved, thoroughly insane Dru soon grace Sunnydale with her bloody prese3nce? "I can't give you a guarantee, but I can almost give you one," Marsters replies. "It was so successful last year to have her over on Buffy and Angel. I think the only real question this year is whether they want to drop her into Buffy or Angel because they can't do both at this point. That's a shame. They can't drop me in, either, but, you know, it means they can't drop Angel (David Boreanaz) into Sunnydale. So that's OK. Keep that big lovely hunk away from Buffy. Keep him away from my Buffy. He's just too damn good-looking."

    When Marsters points out that Spike, Dru and Angel must stick with one show or the other, he's referring to the fact that, after an acrimonious period of negotiations, Buffy will air this fall on UPN, while Angel will remain on The WB. Other than putting an end to crossover episodes for now, the impact of the jump from The WB to UPN has been negligible, at least on set, Marsters insists. "As far as being an actor on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it really has had very little effect on us," he says. It was really between my boss and his bosses, and he's good at not letting us know about what the tensions are surrounding that. I understand that the people at The WB are probably better businessmen than I am, but I think sometimes you have to hold onto a show that's losing money in order to prop up a network. But, of course, they have their own strategy including giving away Buffy, so that the UPN could throw a whole lot of money at us, so that I could get a huge trailer. Besides the trailer and the very nice watch and caviar, it's business as usual. Joss is an outsider and a trickster and he's hired a company of outsiders and tricksters to play the roles on the show, so most of us, if not all of us, were kind of on the outside of things, growing up. We were not popular growing up. So this whole thing just got us feeling like we want to prove something. And I think that feeling that in the fifth year of a series is a very good thing."
    Spike began life as what Marsters describes as a "disposable" villain. That is, the character was brought in to wreak total havoc and, because he was so inaccessible and so abhorrent, he could have been dispatched with after just a few shows. But a funny thing happened on the way to the chopping block: audiences fell for the handsome, sly and witty character, who quite often rattled off the best one-liners, and they also came to appreciate Marsters's sublime performances as the character. Spike emerged as the character. Spike emerged as the character everyone loved to hate and he stayed that way for a long time. Now it's been a long while since he turned, for lack of a better word, good. He's been defanged, even cuckolded, some might argue. And while it's made for great character development, many Buffy die-hard fans find Spike just a bit less exciting and just a touch less threatening.
    "Inside my own mind, Spike is exactly the same guy," notes Marsters. "It doesn't feel any different. He's not goo. He's just hot for Buffy. He's not going to do anything to piss her off. In a way, he's closer to the Spike we met in Season Two. Originally, I thought the interesting thing about Spike was the contrast between the fact that he was a psychopathic murderer and the most sensitive boyfriend you could ever imagine. These two things didn't seem to fit, and yet they were in the same character, which was kind of mysterious and cool. Later on, they took both of those elements away from the character. Dru left him and he became chipped, so he could no longer have fun killing people and he no longer had a girlfriend to be so gentlemanly for. So now, while I'm still chipped, I'm getting to fight demons and have fun with the violence, and I'm also back in love with a girl, which lets me explore that gentlemanly side that really hasn't been explored for about a year and a half. So, in a weird kind of way, I feel like I'm getting back to the original Spike. He still gets to throw out those nasty asides. So it's still the same guy; I just don't have the body count."

    Marsters spent his summer hiatus attending a couple of genre conventions, appearing opposite Roger Daltrey in an episode of VH-1's anthology series Strange Frequency, guest starring as a Nietschean archduke in the Into the Labyrinth episode of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda and working for a few days on an indie film entitled Chance, which stars Buffy compatriot Amber Benson and was written, produced and directed by Benson. For all the side projects, however, Marsters wants nothing more than to spend more time in the Buffy-verse. "Are you kidding me?" he asks, bringing the conversation to an end. "I have been in enough plays to realise that every 10th or 15th play is a really good one, and the other ones, you try, you're aiming high and failing to hit the mark. So when you get that really great play that everyone's talking about and that really works, you feel good about it and enjoy the experience. I'm in that play now and I'm just luck that Buffy's lasting five years and more. My plate is full. The writing on Buffy is of really high quality. The production values are great. My character is great. I'm quite happy to be with Buffy."