Post by Sara on Mar 27, 2005 19:22:40 GMT -5
Posted by deborah:
This article also pulled from the Lost Soul website:
www.secretloft.com/lostsoul/about.htm
Dreamwatch - June 2003
James Marsters was dead when this interview took place, but now he's merely in limbo. That's to saythat Spike died in Chosen, the BtVS series finale, but before that episode could even air the WB announced that Marsters – and Spike – would pick up stakes and move over to AtS, which the network renewed for a fifth season.
It's been a long journey for Spike, one that actor James Marsters was happy to relive for Dreamwatch as he spoke in tremendous detail about Spike's arc over the course of his days on Buffy. "I'm not sure that Joss had a conscious plan for Spike," says Marsters, referring to Buffy and Angel creator Joss Whedon, the man who hired him, turned him into a regular, killed him off and then rehired him. "I don't know that he had the whole master arc worked out when he hired me or when he first developed the role on paper. I think that Spike was first designed to be a disposable boy toy for Drusilla. Drusilla was the main character, I think, and I haven't asked Joss this, but my sense is that Angel was going to go bad after sleeping with Buffy and take a new girlfriend, as often happens in high school. That girlfriend was going to be Drusilla. I have a feeling that he would've killed me off as one of his first acts of evil villainy. I progressed into a disposable villain, and I say disposable because in Joss's universe, evil is not cool. Evil is to be done away with. It's one of the reasons why the vampires on
the show are ugly. The only vampire to have his pretty face and his pointy teeth was Dracula himself. The rest of us when we go to vampire are meant to frighten or meant to be loathsome, really. So, they built the character up as being extremely dangerous and extremely cool. I don't think that they would've built him up that far if they hadn't been planning to kill him. But they didn't, and I finished the season."
Having survived the whole year, Marsters had thought his days as Spike were definitely numbered. "What was that, season two? And that was it. My tenure was over and there were really no plans to come back," the actor admits. "Joss often has some characters come back for an episode so he planned an episode where Spike and Dru came back into town. Luckily for me and unfortunately for Juliet Landau, she was unavailable. She was busy doing a movie and so Joss rewrote
that episode to be more about Spike. He discovered Spike to be really quite pitiful. He was a drunken, heartbroken sod, really, when we saw him in season three, and I was just in one episode that season."'
That guest shot was to provide the basis for a more permanent return to Buffy for Marsters. "It was watching that episode come together and seeing that I was really willing to embrace that side of the character that had Joss get interested in bringing me on as a regular. It was only when Spike became foolish and vulnerable and probably less sexy and less dangerous that Joss actually thought, "Well, hey, this is a person who I can explore humanity with." So, when I came onto the show full time, they really highlighted a kind of toothless vampire. They put a chip in my head, and that was really about watching someone be completely unplugged from his source of power. You got to watch him be really quite pitiful and at that point I was really, functionally and
structurally, the wacky neighbour. I would come in a couple of times each episode to kind of twist the scene a little bit and then leave. That was cool for a while."
That approach was only going to be interesting for a short time, though, both for the actor and the audience. Marsters knew that if Spike was to remain on the show, the character would have to be developed further. "I did get worried when they put me in Xander's clothes, but that was the only time I almost got fired from Buffy," Marsters continues. "I was in a Hawaiian shirt in the make-up trailer and I was mouthing off. "I thought I was playing Spike. I
didn't know I was going to have to play Urkel." Joss caught wind of that and it was before he knew me very well. I'm not really a complainer on set, but he got mad. He was like, "That ingrate, he's fired." But luckily that didn't happen."
What saved Spike and guaranteed Marsters a job for a few more years was Whedon's decision to put Spike where Angel used to be. "Then there was the idea to team Buffy and Spike, and that started in season five and really culminated in season six. I had the idea that Spike should fall in love with Buffy because I thought, in my head, the chip was maybe not the strongest choice," claims Marsters. "I thought it'd be more interesting if he had a real psychological
reason to want to reform, to watch the guy have to choose to be good and how frustrating that could be. I never thought Buffy should reciprocate. I just thought she should torture him the whole time, and I expressed that to Joss. He kind of winked and said, "Well, you
know, I'm writing the show and I have something a little more interesting than that". So, then he became the heartfelt love interest."
Being the love interest was never going to be easy for a character like Spike, and there was little point in duplicating the Angel-Buffy romance, so a different choice was made. "That took a real dark turn in season six," notes Marsters. "I became that unhealthy boyfriend that many girls have in their life, the bad boy who might be really sexy and dangerous and gets their sexual stuff firing, but the girls end up being burned by it. That storyline played out so
dramatically, I thought that the character should be killed off. I didn't know if he'd be redeemable after season six."
That doubt was quickly overcome as Buffy entered its final season and the writers saw a new, pivotal role for Spike in the series' climax. "Redemption was just too tempting for words for those writers, and they decided to reach back and give him a soul. So, this last season, he was doing the journey of the redeemed man or the man who was trying to get a chance to redeem himself. The question was, how can you redeem yourself after 400 years of murder?"
By the time season seven rolled around, no one knew for sure what the future held for Spike, Buffy or the series itself. Rumours spread that the show would go out while still in top form, but then word got out that Whedon might try to eke out one more season.
Later, the buzz was that Gellar wanted out, but that the focus might switch to Dawn or one of the Slayers in Training or perhaps Faith. In the end, Gellar announced her decision to hang up her stake and
Whedon followed with the news that Buffy would indeed close up shop. "Sarah had signalled quite clearly that seven years was about as much as she could do, and so it wasn't a surprise to hear that she was going to go ahead and leave, "says Marsters. "I was a bit surprised that there was talk of a spinoff. I thought that there was enough interest from people who wanted to keep watching the characters, but at the same time, the show is called Buffy and they didn't have Buffy any more, so it wasn't a big surprise that they'd
want to end it when she leaves."
Whedon, co-executive producer Marti Noxon and the rest of the Buffy writing team always knew that the show might end with the final episode of season seven. When word officially came down that the end was nigh, they set about building to a crescendo. The First became
more menacing, the nefarious Caleb wreaked havoc upon Sunnydale and Angel returned to lend a helping hand. And then, in the last episode, Chosen, all hell broke loose. When the dust settled Anya and Spike had perished.
"I wanted him to definitely die gaining his
redemption," Marsters explains. "As soon as he went on that trajectory, I thought that the only satisfying thing for him was to at least have a valiant effort
at redemption, to truly show that he was in the middle of giving it his all. How do you redeem yourself from a lifetime of murder and not be cheesy about it? The audience might want me to be redeemed, Joss might want me to be redeemed, and I might want the character to
be redeemed, but once you try to do that in an hour-long weekly drama and the back story is that he has murdered people for hundreds of years, it becomes a little dicey. That's exactly what Joss does best. He does the impossible, and he does the thing that other
writers say, "No, well, you can't really do that.""
For Marsters, that ending was what he and Joss Whedon had been building towards for a couple of
years. "Striving for that emotional resonance is really what artists are about, and we shouldn't really
shy away from it. I think that redeeming Spike is something that people in their hearts have wanted for a long time. I've seen a lot of T-shirts around that say, "Love, Redemption, Spike." Spike's love
of Buffy sent him on this journey to get his soul back. That was much, much more painful than he bargained for, and it really drove him insane. He really started to understand that a lot of being
human is about self-loathing. I think that he really wanted to save himself, not for Buffy, but for himself.
"You really can't change yourself for someone else," concludes Marsters, who spent part of his summer touring with his band, GotR, and is due to begin work on AtS in late summer. "You really have to do it for yourself in the end. I think I would've said that he
wouldn've done it for Buffy at the end of last season, but after going through this season, I think he wanted to become a better person for himself. And he
did."
copyright Dreamwatch 2003
This article also pulled from the Lost Soul website:
www.secretloft.com/lostsoul/about.htm
Dreamwatch - June 2003
James Marsters was dead when this interview took place, but now he's merely in limbo. That's to saythat Spike died in Chosen, the BtVS series finale, but before that episode could even air the WB announced that Marsters – and Spike – would pick up stakes and move over to AtS, which the network renewed for a fifth season.
It's been a long journey for Spike, one that actor James Marsters was happy to relive for Dreamwatch as he spoke in tremendous detail about Spike's arc over the course of his days on Buffy. "I'm not sure that Joss had a conscious plan for Spike," says Marsters, referring to Buffy and Angel creator Joss Whedon, the man who hired him, turned him into a regular, killed him off and then rehired him. "I don't know that he had the whole master arc worked out when he hired me or when he first developed the role on paper. I think that Spike was first designed to be a disposable boy toy for Drusilla. Drusilla was the main character, I think, and I haven't asked Joss this, but my sense is that Angel was going to go bad after sleeping with Buffy and take a new girlfriend, as often happens in high school. That girlfriend was going to be Drusilla. I have a feeling that he would've killed me off as one of his first acts of evil villainy. I progressed into a disposable villain, and I say disposable because in Joss's universe, evil is not cool. Evil is to be done away with. It's one of the reasons why the vampires on
the show are ugly. The only vampire to have his pretty face and his pointy teeth was Dracula himself. The rest of us when we go to vampire are meant to frighten or meant to be loathsome, really. So, they built the character up as being extremely dangerous and extremely cool. I don't think that they would've built him up that far if they hadn't been planning to kill him. But they didn't, and I finished the season."
Having survived the whole year, Marsters had thought his days as Spike were definitely numbered. "What was that, season two? And that was it. My tenure was over and there were really no plans to come back," the actor admits. "Joss often has some characters come back for an episode so he planned an episode where Spike and Dru came back into town. Luckily for me and unfortunately for Juliet Landau, she was unavailable. She was busy doing a movie and so Joss rewrote
that episode to be more about Spike. He discovered Spike to be really quite pitiful. He was a drunken, heartbroken sod, really, when we saw him in season three, and I was just in one episode that season."'
That guest shot was to provide the basis for a more permanent return to Buffy for Marsters. "It was watching that episode come together and seeing that I was really willing to embrace that side of the character that had Joss get interested in bringing me on as a regular. It was only when Spike became foolish and vulnerable and probably less sexy and less dangerous that Joss actually thought, "Well, hey, this is a person who I can explore humanity with." So, when I came onto the show full time, they really highlighted a kind of toothless vampire. They put a chip in my head, and that was really about watching someone be completely unplugged from his source of power. You got to watch him be really quite pitiful and at that point I was really, functionally and
structurally, the wacky neighbour. I would come in a couple of times each episode to kind of twist the scene a little bit and then leave. That was cool for a while."
That approach was only going to be interesting for a short time, though, both for the actor and the audience. Marsters knew that if Spike was to remain on the show, the character would have to be developed further. "I did get worried when they put me in Xander's clothes, but that was the only time I almost got fired from Buffy," Marsters continues. "I was in a Hawaiian shirt in the make-up trailer and I was mouthing off. "I thought I was playing Spike. I
didn't know I was going to have to play Urkel." Joss caught wind of that and it was before he knew me very well. I'm not really a complainer on set, but he got mad. He was like, "That ingrate, he's fired." But luckily that didn't happen."
What saved Spike and guaranteed Marsters a job for a few more years was Whedon's decision to put Spike where Angel used to be. "Then there was the idea to team Buffy and Spike, and that started in season five and really culminated in season six. I had the idea that Spike should fall in love with Buffy because I thought, in my head, the chip was maybe not the strongest choice," claims Marsters. "I thought it'd be more interesting if he had a real psychological
reason to want to reform, to watch the guy have to choose to be good and how frustrating that could be. I never thought Buffy should reciprocate. I just thought she should torture him the whole time, and I expressed that to Joss. He kind of winked and said, "Well, you
know, I'm writing the show and I have something a little more interesting than that". So, then he became the heartfelt love interest."
Being the love interest was never going to be easy for a character like Spike, and there was little point in duplicating the Angel-Buffy romance, so a different choice was made. "That took a real dark turn in season six," notes Marsters. "I became that unhealthy boyfriend that many girls have in their life, the bad boy who might be really sexy and dangerous and gets their sexual stuff firing, but the girls end up being burned by it. That storyline played out so
dramatically, I thought that the character should be killed off. I didn't know if he'd be redeemable after season six."
That doubt was quickly overcome as Buffy entered its final season and the writers saw a new, pivotal role for Spike in the series' climax. "Redemption was just too tempting for words for those writers, and they decided to reach back and give him a soul. So, this last season, he was doing the journey of the redeemed man or the man who was trying to get a chance to redeem himself. The question was, how can you redeem yourself after 400 years of murder?"
By the time season seven rolled around, no one knew for sure what the future held for Spike, Buffy or the series itself. Rumours spread that the show would go out while still in top form, but then word got out that Whedon might try to eke out one more season.
Later, the buzz was that Gellar wanted out, but that the focus might switch to Dawn or one of the Slayers in Training or perhaps Faith. In the end, Gellar announced her decision to hang up her stake and
Whedon followed with the news that Buffy would indeed close up shop. "Sarah had signalled quite clearly that seven years was about as much as she could do, and so it wasn't a surprise to hear that she was going to go ahead and leave, "says Marsters. "I was a bit surprised that there was talk of a spinoff. I thought that there was enough interest from people who wanted to keep watching the characters, but at the same time, the show is called Buffy and they didn't have Buffy any more, so it wasn't a big surprise that they'd
want to end it when she leaves."
Whedon, co-executive producer Marti Noxon and the rest of the Buffy writing team always knew that the show might end with the final episode of season seven. When word officially came down that the end was nigh, they set about building to a crescendo. The First became
more menacing, the nefarious Caleb wreaked havoc upon Sunnydale and Angel returned to lend a helping hand. And then, in the last episode, Chosen, all hell broke loose. When the dust settled Anya and Spike had perished.
"I wanted him to definitely die gaining his
redemption," Marsters explains. "As soon as he went on that trajectory, I thought that the only satisfying thing for him was to at least have a valiant effort
at redemption, to truly show that he was in the middle of giving it his all. How do you redeem yourself from a lifetime of murder and not be cheesy about it? The audience might want me to be redeemed, Joss might want me to be redeemed, and I might want the character to
be redeemed, but once you try to do that in an hour-long weekly drama and the back story is that he has murdered people for hundreds of years, it becomes a little dicey. That's exactly what Joss does best. He does the impossible, and he does the thing that other
writers say, "No, well, you can't really do that.""
For Marsters, that ending was what he and Joss Whedon had been building towards for a couple of
years. "Striving for that emotional resonance is really what artists are about, and we shouldn't really
shy away from it. I think that redeeming Spike is something that people in their hearts have wanted for a long time. I've seen a lot of T-shirts around that say, "Love, Redemption, Spike." Spike's love
of Buffy sent him on this journey to get his soul back. That was much, much more painful than he bargained for, and it really drove him insane. He really started to understand that a lot of being
human is about self-loathing. I think that he really wanted to save himself, not for Buffy, but for himself.
"You really can't change yourself for someone else," concludes Marsters, who spent part of his summer touring with his band, GotR, and is due to begin work on AtS in late summer. "You really have to do it for yourself in the end. I think I would've said that he
wouldn've done it for Buffy at the end of last season, but after going through this season, I think he wanted to become a better person for himself. And he
did."
copyright Dreamwatch 2003