Jculttimes

In Bed with Buffy...

...In his Dreams! Still, whatever way you look at it, Spike's unfortunate condition has left him gunning for Buffy's camp. We caught up with James Marsters to find out more...

Some might say that Buffy the Vampire Slayer wouldn't be the same without Spike. Following his arrival on the scene, near the start of Buffy's first full year on air, the series really hit its stride. And while Giles has been polishing his glasses and Xander was bickering with Anya, Spike charmed his way through the most recent seasons. Always scheming and negotiating the fine line between humans and the demon underground, Spike is now very much one of the gang. Albeit with two fingers stuck up very firmly in their direction. But even if he seems indispensable, on Buffy it doesn't pay to be complacent.

"I'm keenly away that they could get rid of me 'like that'," says James Marsters ingenuously. "And they'd still be very successful. I was out, they had Faith in, and it was riveting. I remember this!" he stresses. "This is why I show up on time."

Cornering the talkative American actor responsible for the English bloodsucker at a recent press launch, Cult Times is eager to quosh the rumour that, in fact, he is on his way out.

"No, that's just my boss messing with you, man," explains Marsters. Apparently Spike isn't down to be dusted any time soon. "He was misdirecting. He wanted to pull the focus away from Riley's departure."

Who's gone for good, we take it?

"I don't think you can ever say that. Even when you die in Buffy you can come back. And certainly the fans were heartbroken when it didn't work out with Riley and Buffy."

Spike's newfound romantic interest in his former arch enemy had made it inevitable that Spike would, sooner or later, come between them somehow.

"Yeah," Marsters agrees, "and he stakes me, and you can use that in the promos. 'Oh, Spike's dead', you know? For a while people where asking me if it was true, and I'd say, 'I'm not in a position to deny that rumour'!" So with Riley out of the way, is it too far-fetched a notion that Spike will end up in the arms of the irresistible Miss Summers?

"Spike would like that," laughs Marsters, recalling the dream sequence where Spike fantasizes being in bed with the Slayer. "They cut so much out of that! I think it's a rough sell for Buffy to go out with him. I mean, he's going to have to work very hard. And in the Joss Whedon [creator and executive producer of Buffy] universe, do you think he's going to succeed right away? Or is he going to be made to suffer? Oh delicious! It's just wonderful!"

The first sign that the two rivals were getting close, arose in the episode Fool for Love. Worried that one day a vampire might get the better of her, Buffy consults the expert Slayer-killer. And in an attempt to better explain himself, Spike gives as a rare insight into his origins. "That episode was terrifying to me in the beginning," admits Marsters. "The character was revealed to be a nerd. And I did not want to be exposed in that way! I used to be a nerd in junior high school. I was short, I had fuzzy hair and I was a theatre geek. And then I went away to live with my Dad for a year. And there the theatre was the best thing in high school. If you were 'theatre' you were cool. Football was like: 'Who cares?' So, by the time I came back to my home town I didn't care. In fact I didn't want any of the other people to like us. We didn't want to be accepted. We did not want to fit in."

"But being a nerd in Buffy terrified me and then exhilarated me. Because I had the sense that I was jumping off a cliff. That we were going to fly or splat. 'We're going to have Spike be a wuss. If it fails it's going to be bad.' But it didn't fail."

Such fears did little to change Marsters' perception of the character. You would have thought that discovering how the monster, renowned for doing unspeakable things with railway spikes, became a vampire would be enlightening.

"No," he says adamantly, "it was everything I knew internally that I didn't have specifics for. It clarified things that were already there, and showed me in a way I did not want other people to see. That's why it was terrifying. But to be with the show for four years and to be artistically terrified is a luxury that I don't know if anyone else has had. I've never heard of that before. So I'm very lucky. To be that challenged so late in the game makes it easy to get up at 4:30am.

"I've done plays before to find myself that terrified. I've always come out, I feel, flying more than splatting. Well, no," he admits with a wry smile, "a couple of times we splatted."