SHARP SPIKE
	Article from Cult Times Buffy Special by Cynthia Borris
HE IS RARELY recognized on the street. His hair is brown, not blond. His clothes are not so punk and when he speaks he's not even British. James Marsters plays Spike the vampire on Buffy The Vampire Slayer but in real life he's an artistic soul. Arriving with a Frank Miller comic tucked under his arm, James talks of Shakespeare, and Ibsen, as easily as he speaks of Joss Whedon and Chris Carter. A man who spent a good portion of his life on the fan side of the autograph table, James is still getting used to his new found fame.
James began his career in Northern California where he worked in regional theater. He never saw himself as a movie or TV actor but after several years of crossing the country in various shows he realized the ugly truth. "I was making pretty good money in the theatre but all the people who were older and more experienced than me were making the same money. There was an inherent glass ceiling and no retirement plan. I didn't want to die poor so I knew I had to come to LA, When I arrived I was completely prepared to be ALF's sidekick, and lo and behold I ended up in a project that was better than many of the things I did in the theatre."
Depending on what mood you catch him in, James might tell you a weird story about how he got the part of Spike. He's been known to say that he was the last actor to be seen and they were tired so they gave him the role or that he had the best accent. Catch him in the right mood and he'll tell you the truth: he was perfect for the part.
Juliet Landau had already been cast as his partner in crime, Drusilla. "They paired me with three final choices," she says about the audition process, "and James was amazing. He was a real actor's actor since he had a tremendous amount of theatre in his background."
With his arrival in the second season episode School Hard, Spike takes over Sunnydale, setting himself up as the new man with the plan. What could have been an occasional " appearance as a guest villain, turned into an integral part of the series that is still going on as they wrap their third year. "All I really wanted," says James, "was a spectacular death. A good quip and a chance to kick butt and I'm happy."
What he got was a whole lot more. In the third season episode, Lover's Walk, James had a chance to go it alone when Spike returns to Sunnydale lovesick and moaning the loss of his precious Drusilla.
"A lot of what makes Spike more than just a normal villain is that he has true love for Dru and that rounds him out as a person. Even though she wasn't in the episode [due to scheduling conflicts with Juliet] he was still tied to her. He wanted her there so the mix was still the same." With a little hesitation, however, he does admit that having an episode almost all to his own was a great feeling. "It felt good, you know. The words they write up in those offices are exceptionally good. I would take as many words as they would give me. I'd do a four hour monologue by Joss Whedon if they asked me."
Recently, James got to try his hand for the other king of break out television Chris Carter, when he guest-starred in an episode of Millennium. Shooting in Canada, he found himself involved in a more artistic television experience.
"They are a very tight crew who work hard and are really an inch away from burn out. They spend half their time on location which is harder to shoot than working on a soundstage [like Buffy] and they shoot the living hell out of scenes. Television has a language of shots, a master shot, over the shoulder, close-ups, but the Millennium crew shoot so many angles they get twice the footage most shows do. It was like shooting two hours of television for a one hour show."
The character of Eric Swan in Millennium is quite a shift from the marauding and maddening Spike. Swan is a Desert Storm vet tormented by too much knowledge. He was ordered to fire a biological bomb at American troops and now he wants those in charge to share the blame.
"It was a very well written character," says James. "I enjoy playing roles that could just be written off as jerks. I try to let people see that human beings sometimes make mistakes."
In Millennium, James's portrayal of Swan is eerily flat and soulless. He's a man who has run out of options in his quest for the truth. With the good reviews he received for the episode, James has his eye on another series. "X-Files! I want to do X-Files! Right before Millennium aired, I got called in to audition for `gun-of the-week', the guy that always gets shot at the end of the show. But I didn't get it. Guess I was just too cool for the role," he jokes.
In addition to acting, James has taken a little time to co-write a Buffy comic for Dark Horse Comics. Spike and Dru Paint the Town Red was the brain child of Buffy novel writer Christopher Golden. "Chris was on the set doing interviews for The Watcher's Guide. I always get around to Shakespeare somehow and I told him that I was working on a screen treatment of Macbeth. He said, `You know, if we did a comic book I bet it would be published."' And suddenly an idea was hatched. Chris called James a few weeks later and said that it was all set up with Dark Horse; he also tempted James with the idea of a colourful villain who could control dead flesh thus, control the vampires. "See, back in Shakespeare's day people would rob battlefields and execution places of the bodies of people who weren't given the last rites and therefore damned. The dead flesh could be cut up and used in spells." James gives that another thought. "This is so gross... never mind." And on he moves. The comic will be released in April in States and will be available in the UK shortly after.
With the possibility of doing author autographs and more conventions promoting Buffy, James can't help but grin "It's all amazing," he says. "I'm used to doing theatre where it evaporates before the applause dies down. But now I'm being seen in England and Decheckostan [which he swears is in the former Soviet Union]. It's a weird thing. It's how the hair works. It's a lucky intersection of the kind of person I am when I'm saying some one elses words.
And most importantly it seems: "It's the fact that I have a really cool jacket." What more could a vampire want?