Interview paru dans le numéro spécial de SFX paru en décembre 2000.
Spike may have lost his bite, actor James Marsters tells Ed Gross, but humiliation is just making him even more of a kick-ass vampire...
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"YEAH, HE USED TO BE A BADASS AND now he's a wimp" laughs James Marsters in a vaguely Joe Pesci accent, one that's a bit off-putting to anyone who expects him to speak in his character Spike's English twang. "Look, if you ask any actor what he wants to do with his character, he's going to say, 'Punching guys and kissing babes'. I never in a million years thought, 'Hey, let's just humiliate Spike all year'.
"But," he admits, "it's so interesting to play."
Marsters joined the Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe as the vampire Spike early in the show's second season, with the intention being that -like David Boreanaz's Angel - he would stick around for three or four episodes, and then be conveniently dusted. But, also like Boreanaz, he struck a chord with viewers and, more importantly, series creator Joss Whedon, who decided to make Spike a recurring character.
Those early episodes contained a lot of character heat between Spike, his insane lover Drusilla (Juliet Landau) and Angel once he was transformed back into the soulless vampire Angelus. Working together, the trio basically made Buffy's life hell.
"One of the components of Spike that I miss is the romance," says Marsters. "That, for me, is what made him more interesting than just another villain. Spike was supposed to be without a soul, but he seems to be completely and truly in love with this girl, which doesn't seem to make sense but makes for some kind of mystery because you want to watch it to see what's going on with him. A lot of stuff with Angel was not explained completely with the audience, so you had these question marks. These people seemed very close. What was going on with them? I loved that stuff. During some of that, Juliet Landau and I were patterning ourselves on Sid Vicious and Nancy I-don't-know-her-last name, so we wanted a little bit of that heroin feel; that strung-out kind of thing. She played it stronger than I did, but we were kind of smoother together than you would think; kind of floating a little together. That's really great for characters that are coming in and out, but you can't have that for three years. So much changed when they decided they wanted to put Spike in front of you every week."
In season four, Spike became a series regular, but was limited in the mayhem and death he could cause by a computer chip implanted in his skull by The Initiative which prevents him from harming mortals, while allowing him to vent his frustrations against demons and other vampires. Basically he's gone through a bit of an evolution.
"He was designed to be a villain that was going to be killed," agrees Marsters. "He was very broadly drawn, he was very dangerous and hopefully interesting, but probably not sustainable. But now, since they've decided to keep me around, they needed to find a way to make Spike a little more recognisable; to put him through experiences that people might actually identify with and kind of take him down off of that pedestal of super villain. It's really important to stop trying to kill Buffy, because if he keeps doing that, he's going to either be killed himself or he's going to become pathetic in failing so many times. That was my worry. I didn't see how they were going to fit me in."
Ah, but one should never doubt the power of series creator Joss Whedon, who essentially never delivers what anyone expects from him. "The whole situation is typical Joss," Marsters agrees. "He says he's going to do something and I say, 'Okay, Joss...', but in the back of my mind I'm like, 'That's impossible. There's no way a human being can pull that off'. But I bite my tongue because every time he manages to do it."
But now that Spike has been defanged, isn't there a danger that this character renowned for being "in your face" will lose a bit of his edge? The question itself seems to catch Marsters off guard.
"I'm pausing," he slowly offers, "because that's like one of the best questions I've been asked over the last couple of months. It is, to some extent, my responsibility to maintain that, because the writing is exploring the other side of the equation. The writing takes Spike down a peg and I feel that sometimes it's my responsibility to make sure that it's the same character going through this wicked, strange journey. My fear was that they were going to have to soften him so much that it wouldn't work. But in a way, the situation has heightened his frustration and he's even more evil now because he's mad about it."
Discussions of Spike's chip gets the actor particularly animated. "Okay, okay, okay," he says, sounding even more like Joe Pesci in the Lethal Weapon films, "here are two great questions: why is Riley such a stud that he can rip his chip out of his chest with his bare hands, and I just can't get to my little skull deal? This is not complaining, believe me. I'm not saying the writing's bad, but it's interesting. The other question is this: why does Angel get to walk around in sunlight and I burst into flames?"
He is, of course, referring to a common criticism of Angel that the rules of sunlight seem to get bent a bit more for that character than any other vampire on either series. As long as he avoids direct sunlight, he can get around just fine. It is not a problem that has gone unnoticed by executive producers Whedon and David Greenwalt.
"Truthfully," Marsters says, "if they really didn't bend that rule then the character would be constrained to only coming out at night. That means that wonderful ideas for scripts would be thrown out. It means that the production schedule as far as filming exteriors would be hellacious. I think it's because he's the lead. He has to drive the plot and it can't all be at night."
It's ironic that as Marsters has become more of a series regular, he still doesn't get an opportunity to interact with many of the other cast members.
"I haven't had as much time filming with the other members of the cast as you might think," he says. "I'm kind of a newbie on the set.. It's my fourth year and I'm still the newbie! I have much more time off of the set with the cast members than on the set. And it is such a fun set to work on, but a hard-working one. We have fun getting it done, but at the same time, if you get off the set and you go to the trailers, it's a madhouse. A madhouse in a good way! Like Pee Wee's Playhouse."
The cast member that Marsters enjoys working with the most is Anthony Stewart Head, who plays Giles and is the one, incidentally, who coached the actor in developing Spike's English accent.
"Tony Head is the absolute bomb as an actor," enthuses Marsters. "He is effortless. He is able to give weight to a line without doing much. He's kind of like Anthony Hopkins that way. Most actors when they try to be serious, lower their voice and speak in a way that lets everyone know they should be taken seriously. Tony doesn't do any of that. It's his job to tell us who the villain is, where they came from and why we're supposed to care. Exposition is the heavy lifting. Any stage actor who has that horrible first scene in the first act, sometimes the second, is potentially boring because the plot hasn't started yet. Nothing is really happening. It's back information, but Tony just hoists that every week effortlessly."
Unlike many actors, Marsters seems to have absolutely no problem sharing credit for the show he works on; proclaiming the virtues of virtually everyone he has been working with.
"Sarah Michelle Gellar," he says of the actress who plays Buffy, "is just fabulous. The stuff she did on the Angel crossover episode just rocked me. It brought me to tears. Angel's temporarily mortal and he's only got a minute left and she's saying, 'It's not enough time,' and she starts crying. It was one of those moments where the actress decided not to care if she was perfectly coiffured or maybe her nose was running and she was a little messy. She became beautiful in a way because she was showing the inside of herself in the most beautiful way. It was heavy emotion played completely honestly and not for effect. Sarah likes being on the show; she's enjoying herself and the perks that come with it, but at the same time she's totally and completely professional. If you know your lines and you show up on time, she's like your best friend. The beautiful thing is that no-one screws around, because Sarah doesn't. Sarah doesn't pull shit or diva stuff. She doesn't come in late, she's always prepared, she always has little jokes to keep the set light without messing around. She's pretty amazing.
"I've got two great David Boreanaz stories," he continues, sounding like a proud father, "and this is why I like him so much. The man does not whine. He refuses to whine. One time I saw him break a two-by-four with his head. He was trying to get into Buffy's mom's house because he saw me in there. He was supposed to try to get in, forgetting that he wasn't invited so there was a forcefield that kept him out. The way that we did that was to rig him with a steel cable out of his back so that when he got to a certain point he'd be pulled back by a cable. Well, it was one of those things - dusty floors, maybe. God knows what it was, but the chord was shorter than he expected and he got yanked off of his feet, back through the porch and splintered a two-by-four in half. Not just a crack, he splintered it! The whole set hushes. They think David is going to the hospital and we're shutting down for a week. But David pops up and says, 'I'm fine, I'm fine.' The other story is that when I went over to Angel, he had just gotten rear-ended on the highway at high speed. They just took him to the hospital because they suspected whiplash, but the doctor said it wasn't and he should just be careful. He went back to set and he was strung up on chains and hung off the floor for 16 hours while we tortured him. The man would not complain. The one time I realised he was in pain was when he thought no-one was looking at him.I saw his face go ashen. But he's like a stunt guy; he won't admit it. This is the cool thing: he's enjoying himself. He's the lead in a cool show. We all hope we would be able to enjoy ourselves in that position, and he does. He has it all in perspective. "
Although Marsters has credits that range from the feature films House On Haunted Hill and Winding Roads, as well as guest starring roles in such television series as Millennium, Northern Exposure and Medicine Ball, he has found his greatest satisfaction as a part of the Buffy universe.
"The biggest thing is the writing," he enthuses. "I think that all of us are very good actors. For television - and I'll toot my own horn - I think we're a mark above the norm. But the writing is some of the best on television. The writing, especially as far as dialogue is concerned, is something that you'd have to go back to the films of Billy Wilder or Preston Sturges to match. Really, something kind of interesting or pleasing happens about every five seconds. It'll be a turn of a phrase or an event that happens, some joke that happens with such frequency that it starts to froth. Usually an interesting movie will give you something interesting happening every three minutes or so. What really excites me about Joss is we don't even know how good he is yet. He is just starting out. I feel a little weird comparing him to Billy Wilder, because that's like comparing him to Shakespeare, but Wilder never had to crank this stuff out every week. "
It's an admittedly rare thing for an actor to be involved with a show where the writing is of a consistently high calibre week after week.
"It's heaven," Marsters says. " Acting, for me, is much simpler and less important than I thought. It feels like every time I learn something new about acting, it's just about simplifying and not acting and letting the words work for you. An actor needs to know enough about structure and quality writing to be able to choose good words. But once you've chosen those words and signed the contract, get out of the way. Don't bring attention to yourself, bring attention to the words and let them make the money for you. At which point it becomes brutally simple and easy to look cool. I always say that a character is defined much more by what they say than how they say it, which means that how the actor says it is important, but it's not nearly as important as what the writer is saying. Acting then becomes the breath and the life under the words. I love my job and I very much respect good acting."
A sudden thought occurs to Marsters. "What happens when Joss is done with Buffy and he just concentrates on features? My God, I can't wait. Well, actually I can wait forever because I don't want Buffy to end." SFX