Buffy the Vampire Slayer Magazine #7

Date: March 2000
Price: £3.25
Page Count: 68
Editor: Martin Eden

Stake Out
Finally, the British BBC viewers without cable could finally watch Season Three this month!

While some viewers caught up, others were heading for the middle stretch of the 1999-2000 seasons. This issue’s news brings confirmation that Marc Blucas is joining the regular cast, just in time for the villainous return of Ethan Rayne in A New Man. The episode would unfortunately turn out to be Ethan’s final appearance, and actor Robin Sachs would pass away in 2013. The character returned one final time, in the Season Eight comic, where he finally met his end.

There’s also a big massive spoiler warning over on the Angel side of things, with Alexis Denisof‘s Wesley Wyndam-Pryce joining Angel mid season to replace the recently departed Doyle. The piece also suggests that Cordelia’s figure will undergo an unexpected change in the season one episode titled Expecting…

As a special ‘Evil’ issue, there’s an extra 16 pages this month, so we get a triple whammy of interviews from James Marsters, Juliet Landau and Mark Metcalf!

After Midnight by Matt Springer
This interview with James Marsters took place during the filming of Buffy Season 3.

James Marsters is a little groggy, because he had a late night.
    Clubbing? Hitting a punk rock show? Scaring up a late dinner? Naw, just surfing some cable.
    It just goes to show you that Marsters isn’t really bad; he just plays it on TV. Though he loves a very rare steak and is definitely a night person, you’ll never find him prowling the streets of Los Angeles in a feeding frenzy. He doesn’t even have a British accent.
    If he weren’t such a nice guy, his lack of evil might be disappointing. Unfortunately, the only supernatural phenomenon surrounding Marsters so far has been his uncanny ability to create such a diabolical and even compassionate villain in William the Bloody.

I can’t help but notice that you don’t have a British accent when you speak. How did you get so good at it?
I was doing a production of The Tempest at the Shakespeare Festival in LA, and there was a guy from North London there who played Caliban. So I kinda pulled him aside, and asked him for some help. I had a general sense of British accents – I’ve seen every Monty Python.

Do you enjoy playing such a rough and tumble character like Spike?
Oh man, it’s the best. I think everybody likes the villain.

What was the audition process like for Buffy?
It was really cool. It went very well, and the casting director asked me to do it in both a southern accent and an English one. It’s kinda weird; it’s almost inexplicable when something clicks in you, and you just have an instinct towards a role. I was able to just kinda let go and have fun with it, and the usual thoughts of how well I did were just kinda erased. I just had a fun time. Then I came back for a call-back with Juliet Landau, who at the time was precast, though I didn’t know it. We went in and read for all the producers and Joss, and we just kinda leapt right into it. There was a trust right away, I think. In fact, there’s one picture of Juliet and I from our first episode, where we enter our first scene and we kiss and touch foreheads and rotate out to the camera. That just happened organically in the audition; we didn’t kiss in the audition, but that move happened. What was really cool about it is that they had been looking for a punk, rough-around-the-edges character. I’ve had a lot of rough chapters in my past, but I’ve kinda cleaned up, and so I didn’t come in with anything pierced or anything. They trusted that they had the facilities to create the visual impression, and that the internal reality of the character was most important. That’s pretty rare in Hollywood.

Do you spend a lot of time imagining a past for Spike in your head?
The short answer is no, I don’t go by a lot of backstory. Sometimes that can cloud what the script or scene needs, because you’ll have all these ideas about what the character is based on your imagination, and it may not jibe with where the scene wants to go. I really just take it from the page. I just want it to come off the page. Just for my own edification, I do sometimes wonder what’s up with the guy. My feeling was that he probably wasn’t such a great guy before he become a vampire. He was probably a jerk.

What’s your favourite of all the despicable acts you’ve done?
Oh man, definitely the most violent, when I pushed that guy’s head through the glass in my first episode. That was the funnest. It felt great, because in the moment you believe you’re doing it, even though later you know it’s a scripted gag. Also, anything to do with fights.

What can you tell us about Spike’s future?
The details of that are still being worked out, basically. What I was told is that Spike will actually be forced to help Buffy, that he will be a reticent part of the Scooby Gang. He’s sorta blackmailed into it, which I think has an enormous amount of comedy potential attached to it. Plus, I probably won’t get killed, which is always a good thing. I wanted to wear a T-shirt around the set last season that said ‘Don’t Kill Me.”

Hall Pass: Sunnydale Cemetery
A photographic tour of Sunnydale Cemetery, a new regular feature with unprecedented access to the Mutant Enemy Sets. Accompanying the pics is a short guide:

Okay, admit it. Who’s tried to read the headstones in the Sunnydale graveyard, but can only make out the names of the mausoleums? Well in the name of journalistic integrity (and morbid curiosity) we sent a photographer to snoop around the cemetery and get the inside scoops on “Law’s Tomb.”

On the Buffy set, the graveyard is divided into three sections. The large mausoleum occupies one area, with gargoyles looming over it for protection. The area just past the guard shack at the entrance to the lot features the Alpert tomb, as well as several markers for deceased citizens and a few for characters from past episodes. The third section of the graveyard is probably its most famous. The Law tomb anchors it, while a lovely but eerie statue watches over the dead… possibly on the lookout for more vampires.
The names on the markers have actually been taken from actual Buffy crew members, past and present, who have given the show permission to use their names.
While all of the stones are lighter than granite and removable, the one that gets the most action has a bunker beneath it, built especially for the undead to rise with ease.

A Method to her Madness by Matt Springer
This interview with Juliet Landau was conducted during Buffy Season 2.

Even though her accent is strictly Californian, it takes a few minutes to get used to speaking with Juliet Landau. She inhabits Drusilla so completely on Buffy that at first, you’re not sure whether to just say hello or offer her a newborn kitten to drain so she’ll be less hungry during the interview.
Juliet was born with acting in her genes, being the daughter of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain. And though she chose to begin her showbusiness career in dance, it was a supporting role in Tim Burton’s biopic Ed Wood that drew the attention of the Buffy producers and led to Landau’s reading for the part of Drusilla.

How did you get started on Buffy?
They’d seen my work on Ed Wood and they basically called me in for a meeting. Joss, Marcia Shulman and the producers were there, It was just an incredibly wonderful creative meeting. I had just a little bit about the character description of what they were looking for, just a couple of pages. At the meeting, I didn’t actually read, but I started to do a little bit from what I thought Drusilla should be. They had said that the actress should be English or American, and I was like, ‘She should be like this, she should be Cockney, she should be like this.’ We started bouncing ideas off of each other, and it was so much fun. Basically, I left, and within a half-hour I got a call that they wanted me to do it.

You auditioned with James Marsters as well.
What happened is that I was set, and they paired me with the final three choices for Spike. James came in and he was absolutely awesome. Right away it was really cool, because we just worked off each other really well.

So you liked working with him from the start?
I love working with James. He’s great. Everybody on the show is just great to work with. It’s a really talented group of people, so it’s been nice to be a part of it.

Which of the episodes that you’ve done so far is your favourite?
Drusilla is such a fun part. It’s such a rich character; there’s so much dimension for her that every episode is like a little gem for me. I like the ‘Surprise’ episode, which is when I get my strength back. It’s sort of my coming out party, and we assemble the Judge, that big blue character. I liked that episode because it was just really fun; after having six episodes of being weak and fragile, to emerge as a powerful character was a lot of fun.

Do you get into the character’s backstory a lot when you’re preparing?
Once I got the role, we had a meeting where Joss gave me the whole vampire lore for Buffy. He filled me in on some of the things like you can’t enter a house unless you’re invited in, and he also gave me the backstory, so that I knew right from the beginning that Angel was the one who had made me into a vampire, which was tremendously helpful to know in terms of the relationships, and that Spike and I had been together for 200 years. [laughs] We determined that we had to be very comfortable with each other, because that’s a long relationship.

What can you tell us about Drusilla’s future? Will she be back on Buffy or Angel or both?
I don’t know. They are so protective and secretive about the plot lines. I don’t have a really big clue as to what the direction is at this point.

Master of His Own Domain by Mike Stokes
One of those rare actors who can take over a role completely, from Seinfeld‘s prickly Maestro and back to his gloriously evil Master, in life and on stage, Mark Metcalf is truly the Master of his domain…

What were your first thoughts upon hearing about the Master, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
I thought it was a great idea. They had me in to audition, and they really liked what I did. I found out later that the casting director didn’t think for a minute that I would get it.

Why not?
She thought I was the opposite direction. One of the reasons she brought me in was because sometimes casting directors do that to show what’s out there. They show them what they want, and then they show them the opposite of what they want, just to make sure that what they want is what they want. But as it turned out, they liked what I did. I had envisioned the Master not wearing heavy make-up, and I tried to lobby for none. I did want to shave my head and try to do Murnau’s Nosferatu as much as I could to pay homage to that image.

What did the producers have in mind for the Master?
The original concept of the make-up was long, greasy hair or long, romantic kind of hair. I talked them into keeping a bald head, but I couldn’t talk them out of the full-face make-up. It’s a little more monster-ish than Nosferatu is, but it’s there. The image is definitely connectible.

After the Master was killed, were you surprised to be called back for a third season episode?
I was surprised and at the same time I wasn’t, because after the first season when I had died, Joss came up to me and said, “We don’t have anything that we know we’re going to be able to use the Master for, but remember I’m the guy who killed Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3 and resurrected her in Alien 4, so there’s always a possibility.” We joked about having an alternative universe spin-off series with the Master as the Mayor.

Would you be up for reprising the Master?
Sure. I actually would. In terms of what I’m used to, which is theatre and Shakespeare and stuff like that, I was telling my wife the other day, that of the past five years of doing exclusively television and films, that role is the most fun and most interesting. Even though they can’t pay you enough money to go through that make-up Hell, I would love to do that on a regular basis.

What do you think makes a good villain?
Sweetness. Niceness. Somebody you’d want to take home.

Someone cute and cuddly like the Master?
The thing about playing evil, especially with somebody like the Master is that you don’t really have to play the bad guy. You can actually play a misunderstood, sad, pathetic, tragic guy. It crawls into people’s hearts a little bit more. Obviously, you’re not going to want to bring him home, but if you play towards that, people get even more scares, because they find themselves finding a place in their heart for this guy, The next thought is that he is pure evil, and that makes it even scarier. I’ve played a lot of bad guys, and that’s always been my attack. Humanise him as much as I possibly can, not ever forgetting he’s evil or the bad guy. You’re taught as an actor really early on, no matter how small the part is, make yourself the star of the play. If you’re going to play the guy everybody hates, try to make them love you.

Evil Twin by Holly Matheson
A fictional interview with the vampire version of Willow.