Kitten Caboodle by Abbie Bernstein
James C. Leary became a firm favourite on Buffy when he turned up as the kitten-gambling Clem in the Season Six classic-comedy episode, ‘Life Serial’. Buffy Magazine catches up with the loose-skinned demon to chat about kittens, Spike and the hazards of driving in latex…

One definition of a scene-stealer is someone who wasn’t intended to capture the audience’s attention but who becomes memorable anyway. This describes Clem, referred to simply as ‘Loose-Skinned Demon’ in Buffy Season Six’s ‘Life Serial’, who quickly evolved into one of the show’s best-liked recurring characters. 
    Clem’s popularity came as a surprise to actor James C. Leary. He remembers being called upon to reprise Clem a week before shooting the episode ‘Older and Far Away’. “I was shocked. I was flabbergasted! And, of course, I was extremely excited, because that time, I got to come back for a whole week and work with pretty much the entire cast.”
    In fact, James was ecstatic to be cast on Buffy in the first place. “It was really kind of like a dream come true,” he admits. “It was a show that I had wanted to work on since I first came out to LA – it was on the top of the list of shows I wanted to work on, because for the first three seasons of the show, I never missed an episode, and the only reason I kind of lost track of it was because my son was born and that really drastically reduces your TV-watching time. I used to be a really big, big fan of the show.”
    So, as a self-confessed fan of Buffy what is James’ favourite all-time episode? “My favourite, I think, is all of Season Two. My favourite episode I think would have to be ‘Hush’, but I thought the whole of Season Two was brilliant.”
    Born in New York and moving with his family to Texas at 10, James says he always wanted to be an actor: “Pretty much from the time I was five I knew that that’s what I wanted to do,” he recalls. “I didn’t really understand that it was an actual ‘actor’ I wanted to be until probably later. In high school, I was involved in theatre all four years and then in college I took two years off to try and convince myself that acting wasn’t what I wanted to do, but in actuality, it was, so I got back into it in college.”
    James worked in Chicago theatre for two and a half years, then moved to Los Angeles, where he was cast in a number of commercials. He spent two years on the Spanish-language sitcom Los Beltran (The Beltran Family), which was made somewhat challenging by James’ knowledge of Spanish: “I don’t speak a word,” he confesses. “I did it all phonetically. But it worked, because I played the token gringo on the show, so my atrocious accent actually helped the character.”
    During this period, James was also called in to audition for Angel for ‘either a demon or a vampire, but it didn’t work out. I guess physically I wasn’t what they were looking for. A year later, Lonnie Hammerman called me in to read for the part on Buffy.”
    There wasn’t much information about Clem at the audition. “When I read the scene, the only thing I had was that the character was the ‘Loose-Skinned Demon,’ James explains. “I don’t think they had any plans on bringing the character back at all. I know a lot of times on the show, they like to have a really freaky-looking demon talking and sounding like a human. So I just decided to kind of play it like myself. I got a lot of the funny lines and that’s right up my alley. I got brought right in to the producer session, and everybody was laughing and having a good time and it was just one of those days when everything was working out right.”
    The schedule required that James jump right into working with the extensive demon make-up. “The first time they ever put it on was my first day of shooting. They had made a head cast of me and moulded my teeth to make fangs, and I had my eyes fitted for the contacts.” He wasn’t bothered about being covered in make-up. “Having the head cast made was a little freaky towards the end, but for the most part, it wasn’t bad. I did my yoga breathing. The whole face-piece is glued to my face, and then once it hits my chin, it pretty much hangs free, and then t connects again just below my collarbone.”
    It took four hours to apply the make-up on that first occasion, but according to James, it got a lot easier after that. “It usually only took about two-and-a-half hours,” he says. “Todd McIntosh did it with an assistant.
    “The demon poker game took about eight hours to shoot,” James recalls. “The scene was really self-explanatory with the script. That’s the great thing about the show – there are different ways to do everything, but the intent is always pretty clear in the writing and we just did a couple of rehearsals, and everybody got a few little tweaks here and there and we were done.”
    However, not everybody was being professional: “The kittens kept trying to crawl of the table and they can’t hit their marks; they didn’t know their lines,” James laughs.
    Although ‘;’Seeing Red’, the episode featuring the notorious scenes between Spike and Buffy, comes two episodes after ‘Two to Go’, James filmed the latter episode first. This was because Clem’s scene in ‘Seeing Red’ was written after ‘Two to Go’ was shot. “I think they came in a little short for time,” James explains, “and ‘Seeing Red’ was a very heavy episode and they wanted to interject a little comedic relief. They also wanted to give Spike a little bit of a chance to redeem himself, because I guess the way it was written, he came off very, very not nice, so they wanted to keep the character a bit sympathetic.
    “I certainly had no idea what had happened in the scene before,” James explains. “I didn’t get the whole script – I just got my scene. So I think that kind of helped, because that’s really what the producers wanted – for Clem to be a little bit oblivious to how upset Spike was about attacking Buffy, and to just be like a sounding board for Spike.”

    Acting in the make-up wasn’t difficult either. James reports: “Because the make-up is so great and so malleable, it wasn’t like I had to try hard to play an emotion. That’s the great thing about the make-up – it’s so expressive.”
    Still, James admits, some action scenes were complicated. “It was very hard, in the scene in ‘Two to Go’ where I was doing the taste test on the potato chips to actually chew those chips with my fake teeth in and get out a line at the same time. I just tried to chew as fast as possible and hold it in parts of my mouth where it wouldn’t get in the way and swallow whenever I could.”
    Likewise, Clem’s driving away from Sunnydale in ‘Empty Places” called for an extra degree of skill: “You try driving, trying to hit a mark with a car with big latex gloves and contacts and teeth, and get all your lines right and not hit the car in front of you! I never hit the other car, but that was one of the hardest things I have ever done.”
    It would have been nice for Clem fans if he turned out to be driving south… “I was hoping Clem was going to visit his good buddy Lorne over in LA,” James admits. “I’d have liked to do a couple of episodes of Angel to prolong the experience.”
    In the meantime, James has also become a coveted guest at Buffy conventions. “Conventions are like 48 hours straight of doing nothing but improv,” he laughs. “No, it’s a blast. You come into this environment where everybody’s excited to see you and genuinely getting a good experience out of this. It makes you feel good that you can give a little bit of joy to some people out there. I think that’s a big part of the reason why a lot of people become actors. I know it is for me – I like affecting people. In TV, you lose sight of that, because you don’t have a live audience, but when you get to go to these conventions, you get to see that you have made an impact on some of the people and that’s really cool. There have certainly been people who have really, really been touched by the show and have told me, ‘The show really helped me get through a rough year in my like, and your character really made me laugh, and I appreciated that,’ and that to me is the biggest compliment you can possibly get as an actor.”
    Summing up his floppy-eared alter ego, James says: “I really think Clem is a good guy. I know there are discussions all the time about it – there are demons and vampires on that show who have more heart and soul than some of the humans on the show. Clem’s a lover, not a fighter. I think that’s one of the great things about the show: that appearances are deceiving and everybody’s different.
    “I think Clem truly was just this goofball, nice, kind-hearted guy who just happened to have a penchant for eating kittens. He’s a dog guy.”