The Phantom Menace
Interview by A. Lawson– Transcribed by SETJE

When we last saw Spike on Buffy he was, well… well done. He had just sacrificed everything for the love of his death, Buffy Summers, and managed to save all of Human-and Demon-kind in the process. So just where does that leave everyone’s favourite bleach-blond vampire with a soul?

Angel Magazine caught up with James Marsters during a break from filming an early season Five episode, to get the low-down on his transition to the new series, Spike’s new, Ghostly (un)life and lots more……

Angel Magazine : It’s all new for you at the moment – new cast, new crew, new show. How’s the adjustment going ?

James Marsters : Everyone has welcomed me with open arms here and made me feel really comfortable. A lot of the writers, producers and directors are the same (as on Buffy,) so it hasn’t been as much of an adjustment as I thought it would be. I feel very much at home. I’m in the same damn coat, you know?

And how’s Spike adjusting?

He’s hating life ! He doesn’t think his reward for saving the world should have to be hanging around Angel, not being able to touch anything or smell anything or get any tail or anything.

Does Spike feel under-appreciated by the Angel Gang ?

I don’t think that Spike really considers himself a champion. I don’t really think he thinks what he did was that amazing, but he’ll use it to try to get them to save him.

He’ll pull that out and guilt-trip them like crazy,; but if you were to ask him, I think he’d probably have to admit that he was just wearing the amulet. He was almost more of a guinea pig than he was a hero.

Did Spike sacrifice himself out of selflessness or did he do it for Buffy ?

Oh, for Buffy. Definitely for Buffy.

They thought the amulet was going to help, but they really had no idea what it was going to do. He went in there willing to die to back Buffy up. I don’t know if he cares about saving the world. You know, Buffy? Yeah. Save her. She’s cute. But Spike really should move on. She loves Angel.

Does Spike still have hope for his future?

He is very afraid that he’s going to slip away from the world completely. He assumes, and I think quite correctly, that he will be going to Hell. I don’t think he believes that getting fried by an amulet makes up for all the evil that he ever did. So he’s scared. And desperately trying to get help to stay. But he’s a fighter, man. He’s not going to give up. So he has hope that he’s going to save his ass.

Aside from their shared past as William the Bloody and Angelus and their shared love for Buffy, what do Spike and Angel have in common ?

You really can’t underestimate that crazy vampire stuff that happened between them. I hear tales of guys who come back from war who really can’t talk about it to anyone except someone else who has been through it – there’s no context and too much to explain. I think that’s really true with Angel and Spike. They’ve both done things that we can’t even imagine and then they’ve had to come to terms with it because they both got souls. I think they both know what it is to be alone. When you’re a vampire in company of humans, you really are alone because they don’t understand you at all.

Does Spike’s presence alone bring little hints of Angelus out of Angel ,

That’s what Spike is trying to do. He’s trying to get Angel to cut this bullsh*t and admit who he really is. Spike doesn’t really understand the journey that Angel has been through, that he’s not just playing champion for the fun of it, so he thinks Angel is being kind of mendacious. I think at some point Spike is going to have to come to a better understanding about what Angel is really trying to do with his life.

In a way, it seems as though Spike is being repaid for his past transgressions against humanity despite what he did to save the world. Would Spike prefer to be dead?

Yep. Go out clean. Go out in a beautiful blaze of glory. Or if you’re going to come back, come back and be able to enjoy life. But to  be brought back as a ghost ? I don’t think anybody fantasizes about ending up as a ghost. He can’t even go check out the world. If I was a ghost, I’d be hanging out in the locker rooms with the girls, but he can’t even do that. Spike’s gotta hang around Wolfram & Hart.

Who do you prefer playing as an actor, the evil, dark Spike or the kinder, gentler Spike we got to see on Buffy?

I think playing the bad-ass evil guy is always fun, but if I’d only been playing that for the last six years, I’d be bored with the role. I like to play variety. One of my favourite things about the role is that it hasn’t stayed in one place. It’s gone all over the map. I like to say that I started out as a super-villain and went to wacky-neighbour for a season and then the wrong boyfriend for a couple of seasons and then the redeemed man. That’s kind of like four roles in one.

It’s a testament to the writers that they can take Spike over such a broad arc successfully …..

It’s an amazing thing because in the beginning he seemed to be a direct threat to the theme, which was that vampires are not meant to have human aspects. They’re really just meant to be metaphors for the pain of growing up. And that’s why the vampires in this universe are not beautiful when they kill. In other vampire lore, they have pointy teeth and a human face and that’s a very sexy look. That’s something that (series creator) Joss (Whedon) denied the vampires for a specific reason. We’re hideously ugly when we kill. To have a vampire without a soul who the audience responded to and had compassion for was a very weird fit in that universe. It was really amazing when they decided to include Spike in the show as a permanent fixture.

Do you think that Spike’s appeal to the fans was so broad and so vast that Mutant Enemy had to keep him around?

I don’t think Joss lives to please the fans. The fact that the fans reacted well, it does my heart good, but I think ultimately it was the episode where Spike came looking for Drusilla in the third season of Buffy when he was pathetic and drunk and weak, Joss looked at the character and for the first time told me that he thought there was enough mileage to explore the character more. Because evil is not cool to Joss. He doesn’t spend any energy trying to make it look cool. And so it was when Spike got pathetic, Joss thought, ‘that’s interesting’.

How tough is it to tap into a situation where you’re really at the base depths of your character’s life ?

Horrible. Absolutely horrible. I dabbled with the Method when I started doing television because it’s so intimate that the camera will catch you lying. The quick way of explaining the Method is the actor develops a fantasy life, a fantasy world that is so detailed that he can release into that fantasy and improvise and therefore have real experiences in front of the camera as opposed to deciding intellectually what you’re going to do and mapping it out. But I discovered that the Method will eat you alive in television. If you do the Method for a stage play, first of all it doesn’t work, but it’s only three months long. If you do it for a movie, it’s two or three or maybe four months. But if you do the Method for six years, it can really bit you in the butt. The camera wants to document something actually happening, so if you’re playing a guy who is breaking up, you have to go there.

I went home shivering in tears a lot. I really did put myself through all that crap. And I can’t watch it now because I don’t want to go back there. It’s real. And I know what I was thinking. I can’t watch James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause anymore because all my life I wondered how he came up with that incredible performance and I’m starting to realise that he was simply in that much pain. I don’t know what he was going through, but it was very painful. Yeah. I can’t watch that anymore. Wow.

Your background is in stage work. How does acting for the camera differ from theatre where you have the instant gratification of the audience?.

It’s a whole different job. On stage, you’re like a Benihana (hibachi) chef. A lot of people give you the ingredients you need, but when the product is made and sold to the customer, it’s all done by the actor. The actor has to cook it up every night, and that’s a big responsibility. In television or film, you’re just one of the condiments and the chef is the editor later. So your job shrinks down to minutia but within that it’s a challenging as stage because the camera needs you to be much more honest, so much more immediate.

In stage work, you spend a lot of time crating the illusion that ‘this is happening for the first time’ but the camera will catch that illusion. The camera wants it to really happen for the first time so it’s really about trusting yourself. The audience is paying for the right to stare at you. They’re not expecting anything more interesting than what they live, they just want to stare because you can’t do that in real life. If you were able to stare at any human being this close of an hour, you’d learn a lot about them. It takes a lot of courage to stand there and not try to hide.

Is it possible to deliver that same type of performance when acting for the camera?

The greatest example of this is Sir Lawrence Olivier, who was a great stage actor, one of the best, obviously. But on film ?  Not so great. You can see the man acting. You can see the strings being pulled on the puppet. There’s a great story about Dustin Hoffman staying up all night when he was preparing to do the teeth drilling scene in Marathon Man. Lawrence Olivier looks at him and Hoffman’s eyes are all bloodshot and baggy and Olivier says. “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?” My response to that is, ‘Larry, look at the dailies ‘cause Dustin is kicking your ass!’

On stage, you have to translate the inner workings of a mind and put it into your body? When a character changes his mind or notices something, you have to really physicalise it, push it out and that’s what performance is. You cannot perform for the camera. The camera hates performance. The camera knows what you’re thinking, all you have to do is think it. And you have to be very careful to make that transition or else you’re going to be false.

Have you given any thought to directing film or television?

I could fake my way through it, and I might end up with a really good episode, but I don’t think I’d really earn the money. And until that’s true, it’s kind of a waste of time.

I’ve given more thought to producing, actually. I would very much like to produce. I’ve produced a lot of theatre, and I’m good at it. I’m good at convincing people, getting people excited to do things they normally wouldn’t do. I would really love to do a film version of Macbeth. It’s never been done well. I would love to act in it, but I’d never direct myself in a film. I give it up to guys like Mel Gibson, Braveheart was phenomenal.

You did a European Tour this past summer with your band, Ghost Of The Robot, and now you’re playing dates in the U.S. How  is that going ?

We’ve been having really good rehearsals and we’re working on some new material. About half of our set isn’t even on this album. It’s gonna be on the new album.

How does acting compare to musicianship ? Are they two totally different worlds?

Music is a real taskmaster. Technically, to crate something that seems effortless in an emotional _expression actually takes slavish devotion to beat and note and one little tiny mistake disrupts the whole thing. In singing, you can’t release to the emotion of the song because it will clam up your voice. You get so into the song and you start to get sloppy, which is a weird thing because music is such a personal _expression, such an intangible _expression between lyric and melody and chords, but it is a very technical thing to create. I find live music very refreshing because frankly in television, if you mess up you get another take.

Psychologically, that’s a big difference from being out in front of an audience. If you hit one string wrong in an hour and a half, that’s what everyone is going to remember. You didn’t carry the audience to that other place, the charm didn’t come. And more importantly, your brothers ,your mates are gonna be pissed at you – you didn’t hold up your end of the bargain. You can sound check for six hours if you want, but when  you hit live performance it’s all difference. It’s a s if a fog rolls up over the stage and you can’t see anybody anymore. But through all that crap, you still reach out and find them and come together and feeling is exhilarating.

Is that a feeling that Spike will ever come to know ?

There are very, very few people Spike connects with actually. His connection with Buffy  is one of the reasons he was so attracted to her. He doesn’t really include very many people in his life. He’s a total absolute loner. Well, not total absolute…..