Speaking to the Radio Times to mark the 20th anniversary of the Buffy series finale, James Marsters said something that will make every Spike fan very glad he was never in the writers’ room.
He would have killed Spike off. Fast.
The original idea for Buffy, as Marsters explains it, was that vampires existed as metaphors — for the challenges of high school, for the difficulty of life — and were designed to be overcome and die. “Buffy is not an Anne Rice kind of thing, where you’re supposed to feel for the vampires,” he said. That’s why vampires look “hideously ugly” when they bite: it was supposed to be horrific, not seductive.
Spike complicated that. The writers, Marsters says, “never really knew what to do with” him — he went from villain to wacky neighbour to wrong boyfriend to fallen man trying to redeem himself, and eventually became “a kind of guinea pig hero by the end.” They were always scrambling to find where he fit.
And when audiences started falling in love with Spike? Marsters saw it as a problem. “As soon as the audience said, ‘Oh, we want him. Oh, have him with Buffy. Oh, we love that character.’ Like uh-uh. He’s ruining the whole thing. I would have killed me off after probably three episodes.”
His own verdict: “I’m kind of a bastard when I’m producing! I’m heartless!”
The saving grace: “I’m very lucky that they had more imagination and courage than I would have shown, frankly.”
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