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:: MARSTERS OF THE UNIVERSE ::

Despite being dead, Spike has certainly seen a lot of action in the current season of Buffy. His alter ego James Marsters has also been a very busy boy, and tells us of his plans for world domination.

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IT MAY SEEM strange that a show with a name like Buffy The Vampire Slayer can address life's deep philosophical issues. It may seem even stranger that the centre of this moral dilemma is a two-centuries-old bleached-blond punked-out vampire called Spike. But Buffy is indeed tackling the difficult subjects with this character. Can a brutal killer really change his ways? Can a monster be redeemed? Can a creature without a soul fall in love? The answers aren't easy to come by, but actor James Marsters has a slightly simpler take on his character's motivations.

"He's just trying to get in with Buffy," Marsters says, laughing. "He's in love with her, and he is therefore being exposed to situations which turn out good; to situations where people aren't abusing each other; to situations where people are actually helping each other. So he's witnessing things that he hasn't in a long time. And a lot of times he thinks it's ludicrous, but a lot of times he doesn't, and so yeah, that has to have an effect on someone. What lessons he learns from that really depends. You could also learn all the wrong lessons from that. But he is definitely being changed by the company that he keeps, as we all are."

Though Spike - and his relationship with his former sworn enemy, Buffy - is currently central to the show's story, the character had originally been intended to appear for only five episodes before being killed off.

"When I got on the show," he explains, "there was a lot of reaction from executives apparently, and people were talking about, 'Give him his own show,' and blah blah blah - this kind of hot air gets puffed all around Hollywood all the time. And I said at the time, you know, 'All I want is a good body count and a good death'."

Spike fulfilled his end of the bargain with the body count, but managed to dodge death; the character's popularity kept Marsters on the show for the whole of the second season, and after a single guest starring appearance in Season Three, he was brought onto the show as a regular for Season Four, This new status didn't come without problems, however: how would an evil character fit into the show without being the central villain?

"I had no idea how they were going to do it," Marsters says. "I didn't believe they could, frankly. But I was like, 'They're really good, and the money's really good'. In fact, I made a horrible - well, not a horrible mistake, but I learned a lot about a Hollywood set. It seemed to me that I was going to kind of be the wacky neighbour, and I didn't want to do that, I didn't feel like that was the character that I signed on for. That's not what they were doing, but it was also hard to realize that information is not really shared that easily on the set. You're kind of given the script and you kind of go and do it. So I didn't have the script, I didn't have the story, nobody told me anything, I just went into a costume fitting, and they put the Bermuda shorts and boots and the Hawaiian shirt on me and took a Polaroid. I'm a monkey on a chain, man. I thought I was coming to collaborate on an artistic thing, and that was hard. And I let go and let my feelings be known in the make-up trailer, and of course found that there were many mouths and ears on the set, and it went straight back to my boss [Joss Whedon], who didn't get to hear it from me and was furious at me. I had forgotten how lucky I was, and I didn't trust him, and he was right."

Marsters has learned these days to have a little more faith in Whedon's vision, though he doesn't really seem to know what it is, and won't speculate even on what he would do if he were in charge. "The thing is that I don't really think this way," he explains. "I'm such a fan; I'm just waiting to see what happens. I don't want to control it." "[Joss Whedon has] constantly surprised and horrified me every season," Marsters continues, "and I'm more excited than ever now. I'm more terrified and more excited going into this [seventh] season than I ever have been."

Buffy's success and his increasingly popular role on the show have afforded Marsters with the luxury of being more choosy about the work he takes during the short summer hiatus. "It's nice to be in a position where you don't have to make decisions based on money," he says. "So you can really look at a role. There's a role I just passed on even auditioning for, which was a guy that you really have to believe as a woman. And he's a murderer, an interesting psychopath, and it's a great role. But I argued that the gauntlet was laid down with The Crying Game, and unless you can live up to that there's really no point in attempting that kind of role for an actor. So it was a fairly big movie, and it seems like a cherry to get, but at the same time it didn't feel right. It kind of felt good to be able to say that. They thought I was crazy."

Instead, Marsters's focus this year is his blossoming musical career. Though he's been singing as a solo act for some time, and showcased his vocal talents for the world audience in the Buffy musical episode, this summer he's taking the plunge: forming a band, called Ghost Of The Robot, with friend Charlie DeMars.

"I finally feel like I am able to offer music that's going to be worthy of the interest people have," Marsters says. "A lot of people have been asking me when I'm going to cut an album; I've always said I'm not ready yet, but I finally feel like I am. Basically because Charlie has 45 songs already written, and I have five, but we have between us at least one album."

That first studio album is on the fast-track to release, with Marsters and DeMars cutting the tracks within the next three weeks and shooting for release by the end of June. They'll also be travelling to France that same month, performing for a 400-seat house in Paris.

Marsters's hiatus activities last year gave him a sneak peak into rock stardom when he guest starred in the premiere episode of the VH1 Outer Limits meets Behind the Music anthology series Strange Frequency. His character, Mitch Brand, was a lowly guitar technician who was elevated to rock star status after being duped by a devilish talent manager, played by The Who's Roger Daltrey.

"I've always been a fan of Twilight Zone," Marsters says. "I like it when they compact the narrative to the point where it's almost poetry. The plots of the Twilight Zone could easily be stretched to 90 minutes, but they're told in 26. And so everything moves really fast, and that's very exciting. And the same thing was true [of Strange Frequency], it was a rock and roll Twilight Zone. I just enjoyed playing a character that had a good arc to him, who went from someone who didn't know his strength to someone who thought he did."

The same trip to Vancouver also afforded Marsters - a Star Trek fan - the opportunity to work on Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda. "I was in contract negotiations with Buffy," he explains. "And it really looked like it wasn't going to work out. And I was trying to make as much money as I could, so I was going around the world signing autographs, and I was already going to be in Canada to shoot the VH1 special [Strange Frequency]. And [Andromeda] came in with an offer with an insane amount of money, so I'm like, 'Well, yeah. Fly me through Space, yeah.'"

The role on Andromeda, as a decadent Nietzschean leader, was left open for return appearances, which Marsters and producer Kevin Sorbo hope will occur during the show's third season, if Marsters's schedule with Buffy does not interfere. This is, however, a surplus of Science Fiction work for an actor relatively unknown outside of his role on Buffy, and Marsters admits that typecasting is a concern.

"I don't know what to do about it," he says, laughing. "[You're thinking] 'Don't do any more Sci-Fi, James'. My basic worry is that Joss [Whedon] will come up with another role for me, and I won't be able to say no. And he likes genre. I don't think he's going to be doing 'talking around the kitchen sink' stuff anytime soon. For anybody else, I think I'll be able to avoid it, but for him I won't be able to say no. But, you know, on the other hand, that won't be true on stage, and what I'm very much excited about right now is actually music."

Despite his current engagement to his music, Marsters does hope to make a return to the stage at some point in the future, though he has as yet been unsuccessful in dragging his Buffy co-workers along for the ride. Members of the Buffy cast and crew regularly gather at Joss Whedon's home for Shakespeare readings and musical jam sessions, which sparked Marsters's interest in directing one of The Bard's most famous plays.

"Actually, I'm [disappointed] that Joss [Whedon] won't give me six weeks so I can direct him in Hamlet," Marsters reveals. "He would be a good Hamlet. To do Hamlet well, you have to bridge the age differential, because Hamlet starts as a 17-year-old and he ends at, I think, 33. It's a conceit that Shakespeare constructs, because the timeline of the play is three-and-a-half years or something like that, but it takes someone from boy to man. How does someone go from being a child to an adult in the face of the wild f***ing world? It's basically the same thing as Buffy, and it's Joss's - that's his play. Macbeth is mine, Hamlet is his. And I've seen him read it, and he's very good, much better than Kenneth Branagh, by miles. Shockingly honest, horrifyingly honest, funny, witty. A young man just trying to figure it out, just saying, 'Hey, you know what, the world is really just kind of messed up, man. I don't really feel that we can keep doing this.' And the thing is that right now, he can bridge that age differential. If you have a man who's too old, it becomes a play about an old man who can't get away from his mother, who whines, and that's just terrible. And what I argued for him is that if he wants to nail Hamlet, he's going to have to have at least three go's at it, because nobody ever gets it the first time. So he's got to start now. And I pared it down - you , want three months for Hamlet - but I was like, 'I worked it all out! Six weeks. I just want six weeks.' And he's like, 'Six weeks?!' I think [what he said] was, 'Remember that I have a life, James.'"

Marsters's own personal Shakespearean pet project is Macbeth, a play which he hopes to one day adapt for the big screen.

"Even as an indie it's going to need six to eight million," he says. "I feel ready to go, if anyone wanted to give me the money. I also have the luxury of at least five years. I feel like it's going to happen. It's not necessarily the wisest choice for me to want to produce my first film on that scale, frankly. I mean, I really need to go write something in this year, wearing these kinds of clothes."

Indeed, his aspirations also lean toward production; as one of the founders of successful theatre companies in Chicago and Seattle, he has ample experience in directing and producing for the stage with such plays as Life is a Dream, A Phoenix Too Frequent, and Criminals in Love. This is experience he hopes to extend to film-making.

"It's basically about storytelling," he says. "And you start as an actor, and then you move to a director as you begin to understand more about how the larger machine is operating to tell the story. And then if you want to, you go a step even larger to become a producer, and start thinking about how to put the major blocks in place. 'Who is a good lighting designer to work with this director? Who's the best director for this play?' etc. Which is good, I like that. The money situation for film is a little horrifying, but frankly, that's getting better every day. Digital film and the Internet, that combination is just brilliant, because you can distribute your stuff through the Internet and get your initial attention a lot easier. I was a producer, director, actor in theatre, and I'd like to go back and do that in theatre and also in film. Yeah," he concludes, with a chuckle, "I want it all."

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