James Marster's talk at FanExpo 2010, part 1...

[fajrdrako]

On Saturday afternoon, James Marsters appeared at FanExpo 2010 in Toronto, at the Convention Centre. The room was packed full and the panel started early - it's the first con I've been to where things often started five to ten minutes before the scheduled time.



I apologize for my fuzzy photos, but I wasn't close to the stage! This account is partly quoted, mostly the gist, depending how detailed my notes were at any point. (For actual footage of it, you can look at it on YouTube.)

I transcribed as much as I could, but I tell you, I was distracted because I was entranced by the Marsters voice. No account of mine will do justice to the man's charisma, or his ability to express himself with intelligence and style.

First off, in the intro, the moderator promised to ask about the Torchwood kiss, if no one else did.

Marsters walked onto the stage, a dramatic presence in black jeans and top. His hair was brown (Captain John Hart style), and he started out, "Hello, my fellow Americans!" Everyone laughed. (Canadians laugh at that sort of joke.) He went on to say that he likes Canadians, and he likes Canadian manners. "I have better conversations with Canadians than with any other nationality."

He then sat on the back of the chair, in order to be able to see the audience, and to be seen. Asked why he went from stage action, which he loved, to television acting, he said, "To feed my kids. I could sleep on bare floors and starve, but I knew my children had to eat."

So he went to Hollywood, and auditioned for the role of Spike. Joss Whedon met him, said, "You're a jerk," and gave him the role of Spike, whom he wanted to be a jerk. "Playing heroes sucks," said Marsters. "If you're a hero, you have to run a lot... When you're a villain, you just lurk. Bad guys have more fun."

Asked about doing many-faceted characterizations with nuances: "It's the only way to go. I come from Shakespeae, where there are no villains, except maybe Iago, or Richard II. Every villain thinks he's a nice guy."

He was asked for his most proud moment, and he said it was the musical in Buffy, "Once More With Felling". He said he'd been asleep between takes ("the secret of acting for film: sleep whenever possible") when they gave him an audio cassette, on which Joss Whedon sang the songs for "Once More With Feeling" and his wife Kai played the piano for the music. Problem is, said Marsters, "Joss can't sing and Kai can't play. We thought they were crazy. It wasn't so bad for me and Anthony Head, we'd sung professionally, but the others were horrified. No one could get out of it. Sarah got two vocal coaches - no one worked harder than Sarah."

He said that the first bit they filmed was Xander's song. The saw that, and realized it was going to be terrific.

Someone asked if it was true he'd once been tied naked and spread-eagled on a wheel and wheeled onto the stage. "It's true," he said. "In The Tempest. Like Da Vinci's perfect man."

Asked what Shakespeare role he'd like, he was - for the first and only time - at a loss for words for a moment. Then he said Richard III, done with a normal arm and back - "He was crazy. Also Hotspur in Lear." Didn't he mean Henry IV? Is there a Hotspur in Lear?
Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Dawn in Buffy. He said that, although young, she was already very professional. "She was fabulous. She was a Buffy fan before she was cast. She was on cloud nine."

He explained that Spike was the uber-outsider. Joss Whedon hated the idea of what he called "Anne Rice vampires" - he wanted vampires to be ugly and horrible. "He was not pleased with Angel, and he was really, really not happy that I was sexy. He felt the show was imperiled. So for him it was all about taking Spike down a notch." This backfired because everyone identifies with the outsider.

"The show as a whole speaks to outsiders. There's a group of nerds and then there's a nerd even they don't want to talk to. He did the same with Dawn, but it didn't work. She never gave up. I respected her for that."

He was asked if he'd play any aspect of Spike differently now. "No."

Did he expect the role of Spike to become as big as it did? "No way! I was just Drusilla's boy toy. They were going to kill me off in five episodes. All through the series, I thought I'd be killed at any time."





To be continued...