Buffy The Vampire Slayer

You know what else hurts? Pain. And Spike has had plenty of that this season, enduring weeks of torture by minions of the apocalypse-bent First Evil (the incorporeal source of all badness). But he refuses to rejoin the dark side because, in a fleeting moment of tenderness, Buffy told him she believed in his capacity to be good. Spike yearns to be a man, not a monster, and he’s paying the price.

So is James Marsters, the charismatic American actor who plays the British Spike. He’s growing impatient with weeping and being whaled on. Speaking by phone from his home in Santa Monica, Calif., on the first day of his Christmas break, Marsters explained that "Buffy" was a "very moral universe." "And if you’re going to seriously redeem a character like Spike, who is a mass murderer, then he’s going to have to go through a real journey," he said. But he hoped the writers got it over with soon, he added, laughing, "because I’m tired of getting dragged across gravel."

Spike was originally intended as disposable slayer bait, but his deliciously snarky, seductive villainy clicked with the show’s creator, Joss Whedon, as well as with viewers; Marsters is now in his fourth season as a regular. And no character better embodies the ambitious, unpredictable nature of "Buffy" - which veers from drama to comedy to horror, usually in the same episode - than Spike. He has been a bad boy, a lover, a hero in black leather and goofy comic relief. He has a romantic’s vulnerability (before becoming a vamp, he was an earnest, awful Victorian-era poet) and a rock star’s swagger (authoritatively displayed in the show’s celebrated 2001 musical episode).

Spike is dead, but he hasn’t disengaged from life. And in Marsters’ agile, richly textured performance, you sensed Spike’s soulfulness long before he had a soul.

Spike’s female fans sensed something else, too. Throughout Spike and Buffy’s sex scenes last season, Marsters was as naked as broadcast television allows. (Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy remained discreetly covered.) And he has, well, these abs. And these arms. And cheekbones like straight razors. So, not surprisingly, Marsters has noticed that his popularity "has climbed to a new level in the last six or nine months, where sometimes I get chased and stuff."

Why do women love Spike? Well, it’s obvious - tough but sensitive, Spike is the perfect fantasy object. When asked for his thoughts on Spike’s appeal, Marsters laughed and said, "In the words of Sid Vicious" - he adopted a slurred British accent - "’Girls love me ’cause I’ve got a nice face and a good figure.’" Turning serious, he added: "Women enjoy the potency of Spike. But if a man is bad, he will be bad to you."

Raised in Modesto, Calif., the son of a Methodist minister and a social worker, Marsters, 40, sounds much sunnier than the vampire who lives inside him. His voice is lighter than the deep caramel tone he uses for Spike, and his laugh is warm and contagious. Marsters describes his teenage self as "a pretty good kid until I hit about 15 and discovered punk rock." After high school, he attended a theater apprenticeship program at the Pacific College of the Performing Arts in Santa Maria, Calif. And then, he said, "I went to Juilliard, and they kicked me out and all hell broke loose." The Juilliard defeat - his rebelliousness "inspired great hatred among some of the more prominent members of the faculty" - left marks both psychological (he gave up on acting) and physical (he acquired the scar that cuts through his, and Spike’s, left eyebrow from a mugging while bartending in Queens). Marsters regained his confidence when he moved to Chicago in the late 1980s and was quickly cast as Ferdinand in a Goodman Theater production of Shakespeare’s "Tempest," in which he made his entrance strapped nude to a metal hoop. (Deja vu: Spike has been strapped to a torture wheel this season, but, Marsters noted, "In ’Buffy,’ I got to keep my pants on.")

After a well-reviewed theater career in Chicago and Seattle, Marsters arrived in Los Angeles in 1997 "willing to sell out, happily." Being cast in "Buffy" was "wonderful irony," he said. "I get more acting jollies from the show than I did from any full season of theater. The writing is not safe. That’s the best thing about it. It can be horrifying, but in the most exhilarating way."

Viewers saw proof of that in the haunting final scene of this season’s best episode to date, "Beneath You," in which Spike revealed his soul to Buffy in an empty, moonlit church. Marsters gave Spike’s madness and despair a moving, shattered dignity. There was something Shakespearean in his readings of lines like "Why does a man do what he mustn’t but for her; to be hers," delivered in half-darkness, and in the devastating last shot: Spike striking a martyr’s pose - draped around a large cross, bare back to the camera, flesh smoldering - for a love that Marsters calls "unquenchable." While Marsters said he had "real interest" in returning for another season, the fate of "Buffy" is uncertain - Gellar’s contract is up and, as yet, she hasn’t signed another. What does Marsters want Spike to do before the show ends? "I’d like to see him regain his sense of joy in something more fruitful than killing people," he said. "I’ve always envisioned him giving Buffy a garden that he could never go to in the daytime, to give her something alive for a change."

As for life beyond Spike, Marsters has ambitions large (find another series, adapt "Macbeth" for the screen) and modest ("I think I’m a character actor who can be pretty if you apply enough powder"). But when he talks enthusiastically about returning to theater, it’s clear where his heart lies, and where some of Spike’s playful fearlessness comes from. "I miss the interaction between the actors and the audience," he said. "I miss soliloquies, where you can turn boldly to the audience and speak to them. I love talking to one person at a time, if only for maybe three seconds, but specifically looking in people’s eyes and watching them jump. Oh, it’s wonderful! And dangerous."