James Marsters appeared alongside Sarah Michelle Gellar at an event last month — their first shared red carpet in some years — and the photographs circulating since are doing exactly what photographs of Buffy cast reunions always do, which is cause a particular variety of fondness in people who were watching the show in real time and have never quite recovered from it.
Marsters, for those who have lost track of him since Angel’s controversial final season ended in 2004, has had the career of someone who decided early on that he was not going to let one iconic role define everything that followed, and has been quietly successful in that project. He returned to Spike for the Audible drama Slayers: A Buffyverse Story in 2023 — a project that reunited much of the original cast — but in between there has been rather a lot else.
There was a substantial run on Smallville as Brainiac, which suited him: Marsters has always been good at playing intelligence worn lightly, and Brainiac gave him that opportunity in a different key. He appeared in Caprica, the Battlestar Galactica prequel, and put in time on Runaways as Victor Stein — a character who required him to be simultaneously sympathetic and threatening, which is more or less his native register.
He has also continued playing music. This is not a hobby. Marsters has released multiple albums with his band Ghost of the Robot, and performs regularly. The music is better than you might expect from someone who came to it via acting, and he is clearly more invested in it than the polite mentions in interview profiles suggest.
The red carpet moment with Gellar was brief, friendly, and visually striking. Spike and Buffy, in the way that Spike and Buffy always are — a specific gravity between them that the actors have never quite managed to make disappear even when they are clearly just two people standing next to each other at an industry event.
Marsters is 60. He looks, as the internet was quick to observe, extremely well. Some things do not require explanation.
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