James Marsters

Asked if he’s going through the space phase of his career, James Marsters laughs. “Yes, I’m pining for a vacuum!” He isn’t really, but the actor – who played Spike the vampire on six seasons of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE, then moved to its spinoff ANGEL – is on a run of extraterrestrial subject matter. He costars the villainous alien Lord Piccolo in the 20th Century Fox release DRAGONBALL: EVOLUTION, which opens in theatres this Friday, plays real-life astronaut Buzz Aldrin in MOONSHOT, which will air on the History Channel this summer, and essays a cowboy battling marauders from outer space in the upcoming SyFy Channel telefilm HIGH PLAINS INVADERS not to mention his return stint last year on SMALLVILLE as malevolent Kryptonian artificial intelligence Brainiac and a guest voice on Cartoon Network’s STAR WARS: CLONE WARS series. Marsters spoke with iF about his latest alien activity in the first of a two-part exclusive interview.

JAMES MARSTERS: I tend to not really say, ‘I want to stop doing sci-fi now’ or ‘I want to do a space character now.’ I just always say, ‘I want a good script,’ and whatever comes across that I feel moves me and makes me excited, and gives me ideas that I want to contribute, then that’s the way I go.

iF MAGAZINE: You’ve said elsewhere you were a fan of the DRAGONBALL anime and manga comics before the film ever came along …

MARSTERS: I was. I’ve got a son who is thirteen now, and he started pressuring me to buy DRAGONBALL DVDs at Toys ‘R Us and I’m very glad. It led to a lot of very good conversations between him and me, [when he was] growing up. And I’ve come to really enjoy the character of Goku [the hero played in the film by Justin Chatwin] as a teaching tool, because he’s a really good role model, in that he is goofy, he’s meek, he’s humble and, above all, peaceful. But if you attack his family, you’ll get hurt. And I think that’s an adult, that’s a good, peaceful, mature person. And it’s certainly a contrast with some of the other quote-unquote heroes that I’ve seen who tend to strut around and quip and carry large guns. I don’t see that as a good template for manhood or womanhood. But I see Goku as a really refreshing role model.

iF: Well, Goku’s violence is arguably appropriate to the situation …

MARSTERS: Well, that’s another thing that I like about DRAGONBALL, is the other lesson that it’s teaching, that if someone forces you to fight, if you try to find other avenues, but there are none left and you have to stand and fight, to protect yourself or your loved ones, it is okay to be angry. It is okay to draw blood. It is okay to beat someone down to a pulp if you have no choice. I think that also needs to be said. And that’s why I think that there’s a message behind the violence. Akira Toriyama is an artist. He’s the gentleman who developed DRAGONBALL, drew it all, wrote it all. Another really good theme in this project is the unimportance of race. In the DRAGONBALL anime, you get the feeling that it might be Japan, it might be Korea, it could be San Francisco. You don’t really know. But it’s a future idealized world where all the races are intermingled. There are all sorts of ethnicities walking around the sidewalks, dating each other, marrying, and no one even notices. To the point where [in the anime] the President of Earth is a dog. I think that’s a very charming way of screaming from the mountaintops that race is not important. So, yes, it’s a fun ride, yeah, it’s action-filled, but there’s a reason for everything and there’s a reason for the violence.

iF: What appeals to you about your character, Lord Piccolo?

MARSTERS: What I love about Piccolo is that he’s not a nice person, he’s not trying to make friends, but he’ll never let you down, because he’s living up to his own code. And I always thought that he was a really wonderful character because of that, and just to take that character and say, ‘Well, what would make me so angry that I’d want to destroy every human being on Earth?’ To know that everybody has buttons, everybody could do something to anybody if they get that mad. What happened to him?

iF: You play Piccolo in green prosthetics makeup …

MARSTERS: [laughs] You know, the first time we did the makeup, it took fourteen hours. It was nobody’s fault but my own, because I was really married to the idea that my character should be old and decrepit and ugly. I told them, ‘When my girlfriend comes to Durango, I want her to run for the hills.’ In the manga and in the anime, Piccolo is so old that he uses a walking stick, and it’s only at the end of the season of DRAGONBALL that he throws off the cloak and you see he’s all cut [muscular] and then he starts to fight and it’s a big surprise. We don’t do the fake-out. We just reveal him from the first shot as being powerful. But other than that, it’s kind of the same. [During the initial makeup process], I kept saying, ‘Uglier, uglier, more lines, more age, more this …’ And finally after fourteen hours, the makeup artist just slapped me upside the head and said, ‘I’m done! Go to set.’ That was it. But then we got Edward French to come in and do the makeup, and he got it down to four hours and I shut up and let him do his job.

iF: How is DRAGONBALL: EVOLUTION director James Wong to work with?

MARSTERS: He is very good. He’s very calm. On a movie like this, you’d expect the director to be a maniac. But I think the only way to direct something that has so many elements and so much energy is to be the still center of it. So I have an image of James Wong with a fiery inferno behind him and he’s just standing there very calmly and he welcomes me to set. Everyone’s screaming. He says, ‘James, no big deal, we’re just going to put you on a wire and we’re going to fly you up about a hundred feet and we’re going to drop you, free-fall, but we’ll catch you about six inches before you hit, so make your face doesn’t hit. Let’s go.’ He’s asking me to do the most insane thing I’ve ever done in my life as far as stunts, but he’s making it seem like it’s not a big deal. I think that James would also make a good con man, because he can talk you into anything. You’ve finished what he wants you to do before you really question whether you should’ve tried. It was the last day and Justin was kicking me in the face repeatedly for a close-up [laughs]. They only kick you in the face on the last day. And I realized [the wire stunt] was the last shot, and that a stuntman wasn’t going to be used. I think if James would’ve told me that I would be shooting DRAGONBALL with no stuntman as Piccolo, I might’ve run away. So he didn’t tell me, he just took it one step at a time.

iF: James Wong was one of the executive producers on the X-FILES spin-off TV series MILLENNIUM, in which you guest-starred as a traumatized war veteran. Did the two of you cross paths at that time?

MARSTERS: Unfortunately, no. I was only in for one episode, and he didn’t direct that one. But he was certainly one of the forces behind that show. What an interesting show. No, I met James poolside and I screamed at him [does Piccolo voice], ‘I will destroy you!’ And luckily, he liked it.

iF: Er, you threatened him to get the role?

MARSTERS: [laughs] No, no, that was the audition! ‘I will destroy you!’ But the audition was easy, because I just felt like I was playing action figures with my son again. I always played Piccolo when we played action figures, so it was right up my alley.

iF: So you had a lot of home rehearsal for this.

MARSTERS: Oh, yeah. Hours and hours. And if anyone doubts how cool these characters are, start playing action figures. If you take up Goku and Piccolo and you pit them against Wolverine, who wins? I’m sorry, but Wolverine doesn’t stand a chance. These [DRAGONBALL] characters are so powerful, so cool and so visually interesting. I’m very excited about introducing DRAGONBALL to people who have not seen the anime, who are not familiar with the manga. There are frankly a lot of people who’ve never met Goku and we’re going to help with that.

James Marsters talks more DRAGONBALL: EVOLUTION, plus HIGH PLAINS INVADERS, MOONSHOT and the inevitable will-there-ever-be-any-more-Spike question. iF: What age group do you feel DRAGONBALL: EVOLUTION is aimed at?

MARSTERS: Well, just like the anime, I think we are counting on the audience growing up with us. So just as the HARRY POTTER films started [geared] toward a more youthful [audience] and then have grown up as the story progresses, so are we going to become more and more mature as we go. If you look at DRAGONBALL, the anime, it is targeted to younger kids. It’s mostly played for comedy, with some safe, smaller doses of violence. And then DRAGONBALL Z skews more toward the action, still with some comedy. So this is a very family-friendly film and I think that I would be comfortable taking a seven-year-old to see this picture. I think even some five-year-olds would enjoy it very much. Because underneath it is love and understanding and peace. I think that as long as the hand underneath it has love, then the exciting and the scary parts seem to fit together into something that’s not terrorizing. But at the same time, I love DRAGONBALL. I love DRAGONBALL Z. I love DRAGONBALL GT. So I would say seven to seventy-five.

iF: Your voice is digitally altered in the film.

MARSTERS: They lowered it by half a pitch. I was pretty low going in, but they wanted it to rumble just a little bit more. And I think that’s fine for where we are now, for how the script was written. Piccolo does not have a whole lot of screen time, so that when he’s on, he’s got to impact heavily. What I’m happy about is, they didn’t have to lower it so much that it takes away all the inflections I was doing. The things I was trying to do with the lines are still there, it’s just a bit lower. I’m really hoping that I can do vocal training so they don’t have to [digitally] lower it for the second one, so when the character becomes his younger self, he doesn’t have to have that mountain rumbling.

iF: Do they know they’re going to make a second one, or are they seeing how well it does?

MARSTERS: I think they’re good business people who are going to wait until they see the return on this film before they pull the trigger on the second, but they have signed all the cast to multiple pictures. I’m signed up for three. I hope there are five or seven of them.

iF: Have you been to Asia to promote DRAGONBALL: EVOLUTION?

MARSTERS: I went to Korea, I went to Thailand and I went to Japan. They were very gracious.

iF: Is everybody still interested in BUFFY?

MARSTERS: Yes, very much. [People] still want to know if there is going to be another project. People still want to know if there was any dirt on the set [laughs]. Stuff like that. My answer is, ‘If Sarah Michelle Gellar [who played Buffy] wants to do a sequel, I’ll stand by her side any day, and yes, there was dirt on the set, but you’re not going to get it out of me.’ [laughs]

iF: Would you still be up for a series or a telefilm with Spike?

MARSTERS: I think if we did that, we’d have to do some camera tests or some lighting tests, because Spike doesn’t age, and I have [laughs].

iF: Could you say getting the soul aged him?

MARSTERS: Well, yeah, or you could say he’s drinking pigs’ blood, so he’s aging slowly, but I always thought that one of the cool things about being a vampire is that you’re immortal, and if you take that away, it’s not quite so cool. The good news is, I never got any fill light [on BUFFY]. Sarah got all the fill light and I got the slant, shadow light, because they wanted me to be villainous, and that’s cool, but I wonder if they actually put me in that costume and actually gave me some fill, it might actually look about the same. But we’d have to test that, because I don’t want Spike to age.

iF: Are there any similarities between Spike and Piccolo?

MARSTERS: Piccolo is less tortured than Spike. Piccolo is asexual. Spike was always kind of confident, except for his love life. It mixed him up a little bit. But Piccolo just does not have that side. So there are some of the same colors as the darker aspects of Spike, enjoying hurting people, being really angry, stuff like that, but just taking all the sex out of it.

iF: With HIGH PLAINS INVADERS, were you attracted to it by the script?

MARSTERS: Yeah. The SciFi Channel has been sending me scripts for a number of years, and this was the first one where I really liked the ride. There are no hitches, it had a good propulsion to it – a simple story but good secondary characters and a good romance in the middle of it. It occurred to me that there’s a problem with Western films, which is that you have to have certain elements, or people don’t believe it as a Western film. You have to have the kindly store owner. You have to have the repentant train robber, or you have to have the drunken sheriff. There are certain notes you have to hit in Westerns. And if you don’t hit those notes, it’s not a Western, but what that forces Hollywood to do is keep making the same film over and over and over again. So the big question of Hollywood is, how do you make a Western, but find that little switch, that little twist that you can give it to freshen up the genre? Clint Eastwood did it [with UNFORGIVEN]by making his hero evil. He was trying to be forgiven and couldn’t be. There are lots of really wonderful Westerns that just find something to turn on its head. And it occurred to me, ‘Hey! We’re adding aliens! So we can still hit all the notes and be a real Western, but we have our little flip.’

iF: Had you thought as a kid, or at any point in your career, ‘Gosh, I’d like to be a cowboy’?

MARSTERS: Of course. Of course. Although I usually wanted to be the Indian. I always thought they were a little cooler [laughs].

iF: And you play real-life astronaut Buzz Aldrin in MOONSHOT. You’d previously played real-life thief Bobby Comfort in the USA TV movie COOL MONEY and serial killer Ted Bundy in the Lifetime TV movie THE CAPTURE OF THE GREEN RIVER KILLER.

MARSTERS: Yeah, [as Bundy] I played the execution scene. That was easier than the other scene [where Bundy is talking about the joys of killing].

iF: Is Aldrin the first time you’ve played a real person who’s still among the living?

MARSTERS: For film, not for stage. Playing Buzz Aldrin was just fabulous. For my money, he was the most interesting of the three who went to the moon the first time in Apollo 11. He saved the NASA program, both with his ideas about how to operate in zero gravity for the extra-vehicular activity, the EVA – he saved the program by fixing the EVA, and he saved the program by figuring out how to rendezvous between the Lem and the Orbiter, because unless you could link back up, you were dead. He figured out all this stuff the scientists couldn’t figure out.

iF: Anything else you’d like to say?

MARSTERS: Just that we have worked really hard to give the world the version of DRAGONBALL that we responded to when we first saw the anime or when we first read the manga. I know that everyone has their own individual response to this material, but just know that DRAGONBALL: EVOLUTION is our best attempt at being true to the original.