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

growing up with buffy: James Marsters
by Richard Moore

Cult Times Special #13

     For one year he was the baddest of the bad on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Spike (James Marsters) - aka William the Bloody - rode into Sunnydale with his girlfriend Drusilla (Juliet Landau) and set about making life miserable for the resident Slayer.  During his tenure, the sadistic blond-haired vampire would lead an attack on the High School, hire Tarakan assassins to kill Buffy and plan global chaos by resurrecting The Judge.  Some of you might rightfully think the season should have ended with Spike's just reward - being 'dusted'.
     However, thanks to Marsters' charismatic portrayal of this despicable creature, Spike was a huge hit with the viewers.  In fact, he was far too good to waste.  So series creator Joss Whedon ended Season Two with a tactical withdrawal: Spike, with Drusilla, drove out of Sunnydale, vowing never to return.
     He was back for one week only during Season Three, pouring his undead heart out to Mrs Summers after his break up with Dru.  There was even a temporary alliance with Buffy and Angel, but by the hour's end he was gone again.  And Marsters never really expected him to be back.
     Of course, it's impossible to predict the plans of Joss Whedon.  For the fourth season, Marsters was signed up as a series regular - and he would be fighting alongside the good guys!
     "Joss called me up out of the blue," the actor tells Cult Times.  "I had resigned myself that I would never be able to work with him again.  It was too painful to hope for.  How many times does lightning strike?  How many times do you win the lotto?  Do you know what I mean?  He is a marvellous writer.  He is one of the best America has right now in film, television or stage.
     "Like a lot of things when you let go, it comes to you.  He just called me up and said, 'I would like to have you be a cast member'.  I picked my tongue up off the floor - I'm the luckiest actor in Hollywood!"
     Of course, it wasn't quite as simple as that.  Whedon would first bring in Spike for a special crossover storyline in which he would be searching for the mythical Gem of Amora.   The story began in Buffy's The Harsh Light of Day and concluded in Angel's In the Dark, and through it all Spike was as bloodthirsty and vicious as ever.
     As the focus of this special two-hour TV event, Marsters was in the unique position to compare working on both series - and admits that actually the experiences were very similar.
     "David [Boreanaz] and Sarah [Michelle Gellar] are not ego-driven as actors," he defines.  "They care about the work.  They don't like to screw around; they like to have fun working, which is what I like.  I do have enormous fun working, and if I feel we're just screwing around and telling jokes I get antsy.  I think a lot of people take their cue from a lead in a series and if the lead is a good actor, if the lead is professional, turns up on time, knows their lines, then the work becomes focused.   What struck me more than anything was the professionalism on both sets.
     "I'll tell you a story about David.  In the episode I was in he was actually chained up [in the studio] for 15 hours.  Right before that he had been rushed to the emergency room because he got rear-ended on the freeway.  Somebody hit him at 50 miles an hour.  The man would not admit to being in pain.  He is like a stunt guy; he could have his ribs broken and he would say, 'I'm fine, let's get this shot'.   That's David in a nutshell; I only knew he was really in pain because I saw him wince when he thought no one was looking at him."
Without a doubt, Spike's finest moment in the crossover episodes occurs in the pre-title sequence of In the Dark.  Observing Angel from afar, the vampire entertains himself by inventing dialogue for his nemesis.  And the results are hilarious.
     "They took all the stuff that any Beavis or Butt-Head might lob at the show from the couch - the 'nancy boy hair gel', 'to the Angel mobile' - and had the courage to just put that in the mouth of one of the characters.  I thought it was brilliant.  It was so assured and confident."
     Just a few episodes later and Spike was back in Sunnydale, only to be capture mysterious masked commandos who stalk the college campus.  The stand-out story The Initiative found the vampire caged in a maximum security establishment by Riley Finn (Marc Blucas) and his comrades, one of many vampires and demons being held for experimentation.   Wily as ever, Spike escapes, arrives at Buffy's dorm and bares his fangs at Willow (Alyson Hannigan).  As the episode went to a commercial break, we could only assume that TV's favourite nerd was vampire food.
     Cue Whedon's big surprise: Spike was now impotent.  Thanks to an electronic implant embedded in his skull by The Initiative, William the Bloody was both now harmless and helpless.  The scene that followed, in which Willow comforts the embarrassed Spike, was another comedy highlight.
     "That was the hardest time not to play for comedy," Marsters explains, "because it would only be funny if he really was bombed, if he was taking this very seriously.
     "The crew had a field day.  The jokes on Spike's behalf were flying fast and furious.  But really that came down to the work, it felt like a very dramatic scene, and then you see it played and it's very funny.  The writing makes it funny, but it's only funny because it's so sad."
     After spending a couple of episodes tied to a chair, Spike became a fully-fledged but begrudgingly accepted member of The Scooby Gang.  A pathetic figure who now drinks his blood from a bag, he has been stripped of his pride, his violent tendencies and has even - on occasion - been seen sporting a tasteless Hawaiian shirt.
When asked what he has learnt about Spike during the course of Season Four, Marsters pauses for thought.
     "I've learnt that he doesn't have to be killing people to be passionate," he replies.  "He existed on a very simple level before.  He killed people and kissed Dru - and that was Spike.  The thing that made him more interesting than a normal villain was that he was truly in love - I mean profoundly and beautifully in love with his girlfriend.  Both of the things that drove him have been taken away and he is still himself, which is a testament to the writing.
     "Spike is still basically the same person, he is just physically unable to kill anybody.  He has no loyalty to these people at all, so how do you work him into the plot given that?  Yet they are still able to do it, and it's really interesting.
     "I've enjoyed working with these people enormously, especially Tony Head, who I consider to be one of the better actors that America has right now.  We would do well to keep him around and not let him go back to England.  He's really fabulous!"
     As if events could not get any weirder, Spike and Buffy would fall in love in Something Blue.  Of course, it was all the work of a spell cast by the love-lorn Willow, but for the actors it was a terrific opportunity to play out of character.
     "If you are fighting Buffy or kissing her, you know you are in the middle of things!" reasons Marsters.  "Getting to kiss Buffy was great.  I got the script and went, 'Oh my God!'  The problem was I was still smoking cigarettes at the time and Sarah hates smokers' mouths.  So I was feverishly brushing my teeth in my trailer at all times."
     Ask any fan to list their favourite episode from the current season and chances are they will select Hush, Joss Whedon's surreal Fantasy in which the entire population of Sunnydale is rendered (literally) speechless by the arrival of murderous floating creatures known only as The Gentlemen.  A brave experiment in TV drama, Hush could yet be in the nominations for best writing in the Emmy Awards.
     "The thing that I appreciated about Joss Whedon before Hush was the dialogue," says Marsters.  "I think you'd have to go back to the 1930s to find dialogue that sparkles like that, frankly.  Something interesting is said with such frequency on the show that you, in fact, miss a lot of it.  It starts to bubble and has effervescence; right on the heel of something interesting, something else happens.
     "I thought that was the man's strength.  I think he showed everybody that he has a lot more in his pouch of tricks than just the dialogue.  He knows that the show is known for the dialogue and the quipping so he went, 'Hey, let me flush it!  Let's just drop it and show you what I can do without it'."
     Given that there were actually few words spoken in Hush, was the script noticeably shorter than the rest?
     "Oh no, " Marsters corrects.  "There was actually a lot of description of exactly what is happening every second.  The same kind of care that was in the language was in there.  Joss is very specific."
     Marsters is remaining tight-lipped about any surprises we can expect in the remainder of Season Four, although it is common knowledge that Joss Whedon has been attempting to secure the talents of Juliet Landau for a one-off appearance as Dru.
     "They want her to come back and she wants to come back, but the scheduling is difficult as she's busy doing films right now," offers the actor.  "She's on her third and she's on a really strong string so it hasn't worked out.  It's heart breaking.  I'd like to slap her around - she left me for a mucus demon!"
     Marsters has no doubts concerning Dru's reaction to her ex-boyfriend's change in status.
     "She will sneer at him.  She'll say, 'You are pathetic!'"
     While there's little doubt that Spike will remain the most unpredictable element in the Scooby Gang, don't expect a sudden return to his old ways.  As Marsters clarifies, an evil Spike would only have a limited shelf life in the series.
     "The villain cannot achieve his goal or else there would be an unhappy ending.   If Buffy dies, we're all out of work.  Yet he can't fail too many times because then he becomes ineffectual and boring.  So Spike is going to remain alive and I am going to be employed [then he has to remain with the good guys]."
     The actor stops for a moment, hit by a sudden thought.
     "I don't know," he says with mock concern.  "The moment I say anything, Joss is going to go the other way!"