Interview with the Vampires


Article by Tim Apello from TV GUIDE

The WB's kicky hit, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Tuesdays, 8 P.M./ET), used to have a problem: The battalions of anonymous neck biters our hero (Sarah Michelle Gellar) offed each week provided reliably good action scenes, but they just didn't have the staying power to serve as dramatic foils. So Buffy executive producer Joss Whedon created a trio of bloodsucking regulars who do not go easy into that good night. Witness Angel (David Boreanaz), Buffy's hunky on-again, off-again vampire boyfriend, who was impaled on a sword in the season ender but is not dead yet -- in fact, he'll get his own spin-off in the fall of 1999. At the beginning of Buffy's second season, Angel acquired two Sid and Nancy-like roommates: his old pal Spike (James Marsters), who resembles an undecayed version of Billy Idol with an education (the Juilliard-trained stage actor's previous TV credits include guest spots on Northern Exposure), and Spike's girlfriend, Drusilla (Juliet Landau), who looks like an evil Ophelia or a creepy young female version of her dad, Martin Landau (she appeared with him in Tim Burton's 1994 movie, "Ed Wood"). Before returning to the set to start work on the show's third season, the fanged gang sat down with TV Guide for a chat at that immemorial haunt of bad boys and girls, Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. Unlike the vampires they play, the actors ate their vegetables, but like their on-screen selves, they do like to sass and tease each other to death.

TV Guide: David, Angel was Buffy's first star vampire. Is it true you were actually discovered in a Lana Turner-at-the-sodafountain way?

David Boreanaz: Yeah, my future manager saw me walking my dog, and he thought I'd look good in this part.

James Marsters: Were you wearing a tight sweater?

Juliet Landau: Were you naked?

Boreanaz: [joking] I was wearing a dress.

TVG: On Buffy, you three seem like teens on the high school scene, only worse.

Landau: In the first meeting, Joss said we were like the bad kids parents don't want their kids to grow up like, the ones who do drugs and don't graduate.

Boreanaz: You have youthful innocence [like Buffy's], and then you have vampires who are sexy and mysterious. There's purity, and there's evil. They work well together.

Landau: Joss has such a vision.

Boreanaz: He's always running around with his hair uncombed, going, "I have never slept! I have never slept!"

TVG: He's the Undead Producer. No wonder he gets the vampires right.

Landau: He said he had these characters crawling around in his brain for 10 years.

TVG: On the show, how did your threesome get together?

Marsters: Angel was my mentor, and I'm grown up now and I don't need him anymore. [Spike is about 200 years old, Angel an older and wiser 242.] And Angel turned Dru into a vampire. [addressing Boreanaz] You were pretty rude about that.

Landau: Prior to meeting Angel, I was, like, a sweet, normal, happy English girl. He killed my whole family in front of me. I fled to a convent, but he found me the day I was going to take my vows and tortured me, and then he made me a vampire.

TVG: And how did Spike acquire his psychological problems?

Marsters: I don't think he has any psychological problems.

Landau: That's me.

Marsters: I'm a psychopath, but I don't have a problem with that.

TVG: So what brought you to Sunnydale?

Landau: I'd been attacked by a mob in Prague. I was weak and near death, like a junkie who needs a fix -- the fix, of course, being blood. And Angel turns out to be the cure-all. [Spike brought Drusilla to town to drain Angel's life energy into her, but Buffy stepped in to save her, uh, man.]

TVG: So now it's all worked out, and you're the scariest romantic triangle since the Archie comics.

Landau: In a funny way, [Drusilla and Spike] have, like, a healthy relationship. I mean, we do go out and kill people, but we have a loving, giving relationship. But with Angel, it's almost like an incestuous, abusive relationship. That's why when I chained him to a bed and burned him with holy water [earlier this season], it was sort of like a reversal, a strange cross between sexuality and power.

TVG: Hey, it served him right.

Boreanaz: Angel has a very sarcastic side, and he knows how to torment Spike. Every time Spike pushes my buttons, I push his buttons. He's all talk. It's like tennis, and Drusilla is in the middle, watching.

Landau: And I'm kind of enjoying the bullfighting -- over me!

Marsters: She has that power to keep Spike and me at odds. Yet if she wasn't in the room, we'd probably end up killing each other.

Boreanaz: Everybody's waiting for a showdown.

TVG: David, you've been with the show since the low-budget early days. How has success changed Buffy?

Boreanaz: [Back then] everything was a bit more chaotic. We had to go to locations for graveyards [in downtown L.A.].

.

Landau: A real graveyard?

Boreanaz: Yeah. Unbelievable! Now we have more money to play with. I think there's more intensity now as far as how the characters are interwoven.

Landau: It's really been sort of obscenely fun to work on.

Marsters: We're always saying, "How can we get sex into this?"

TVG: A lot of people think a vampire show is more into violence than sex.

Landau: We push the envelope, but really, the level of gore is not very much.

Marsters: I have trouble with violence. That's not what Joss is about.

TVG: It's always morally clear that the vampires are the bad guys.

Marsters: We vampires, we may be funny, but we are not good people.

TVG: It's like ["Pulp Fiction" director] Quentin Tarantino's motto: Funny and scary -- two great tastes that taste great together.

Landau: [Tarantino] said he likes the show a lot. We do [blend funny and scary]. We're so inside these characters that the logic of them feels like, "Oh, this is normal. I'm poking my doll's eyes out, and that's fine." You know?

Boreanaz: James hums when he gets into it. And I do a golf swing. [Juliet's] dancing with headphones. And then we all come together.

TVG: It's all about togetherness. And biting people. As Spike puts

it, humans are just Happy Meals with legs. So what's next for you guys?

Landau: Joss says if we let anything out, it won't happen. What's fun is we're unpredictable.

Marsters: I love how he presents the audience with something they desperately want to see -- like Angel and Buffy getting together -- and then takes it away. He delights in denying them that.

TVG: After Buffy slept with Angel, he suddenly turned cold and evil.

Boreanaz: I'm the jerk who never phones the morning after.

TVG: In the last episode it looked as if fans were going to be denied the whole relationship forever; apparently, Buffy stabbed Angel and killed him. Not that a lot of girls wouldn't sympathize.

Boreanaz: Well, if you'd done your vampire-slayer homework, you'd know that vampires only die if you get them in the heart with a wooden stake.

TVG: So what about the 1999 season, when Angel gets his own show? Are you going to make guest appearances on the old show, say, in Buffy's bedroom when she least expects it?

Boreanaz: Believe me, Sunnydale hasn't seen the last of this guy.


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