Newsgroup: it.fan.tv.buffy
Titolo: Intervista a James da Dreamwatch

Intervista a James Marsters pubblicata sul numero di Luglio della
rivista "Dreamwatch".
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."
Fonte: Dru_it
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-- 
Jolan Tru
Filippo "Hytok" Simone - 
http://www.startrekitaliamagazine.it/
*L'oracolo Romulano di Sunnydale* - 
http://www.ussexcalibur.it/
http://members.xoom.virgilio.it/hyterdeflok/

 rivista "Dreamwatch".
-CUT-
Cos'è, lo spoiler space è diventato un optional? Visto che c'è uno spoiler
grande come una casa nelle prime righe? Magari uno che la settima non l'ha
ancora vista, l'inglese lo capisce lo stesso, no?

 rivista "Dreamwatch".
Io avrei cambiato l'incidenza dello spoiler, magari aggiungendo un
centinaio di righe vuote...
-- 
"30 orizzontale, 2 lettere: lo e' la domenica
di Rai 1."
"Opel."
"Eh?"
"Il 30 orizzontale e': costruisce l'Astra. Ed
e' di 4 lettere."
"Tu bari."