Beloved Buffy Villain Held Real-Life Grudge Against Sarah Michelle Gellar

Now, to clarify, this Buffy grudge wasn’t one where Marsters was seething with jealousy or anger toward his costar. In fact, it doesn’t even sound like the grudge extended past the set. But whenever these two actors shared the screen together, Marsters took the opportunity to mess with his coworker in a series of weird ways.

According to Marsters, his Buffy the Vampire Slayer grudge was very much one-sided. In an interview, he described Gellar by saying that she was “gracious and kind,” but he nonetheless possessed an “overwhelming need to take her down a peg” for one simple reason: “she was Buffy.” While this likely helped him get into character to play the very antagonistic Spike, Marsters credits his need to go after the star more to his own background than his character’s background. 

In the interview, this Buffy villain-turned-hero explained that his weird grudge was the result of his “punk rocker” background, one that gives him a nearly compulsive need to “tear down people in subversive situations.” To Gellar’s face, Masters was always polite, cheerfully greeting her in the morning and offering tea “because Sarah is the lead.”

When filming began, though, he would think “I’m gonna ruin your day” and do his best to make Gellar forget her lines or even get more aggressive during action scenes than the stunt doubles who “have to be careful because you’re fragile and might break.”

Hearing Marsters smugly follow that comment with “I don’t have to be that careful” is powerful proof of how much Spike is Marsters and vice versa. That really ties back to his comment about the punk rock background: you see, Marsters is a real punk authority, and he had to correct series creator Joss Whedon about Spike’s characterization.

Whedon claimed that Spike should be more like Sid Vicious, but the actor responded that the bassist was “an idiot” and declared that Spike should instead be modeled after Johnny Rotten, the Sex Pistols front-man who “is a frickin’ genius” who always came off as “maniacal, fiery, subversive, and howlingly funny.”

This Buffy actor got his way with Spike’s design and personality, and his grudge driving him to put Gellar in her place really does line up with his own subversive punk rock persona (a persona he got to really indulge when he became the lead singer of the rock band Ghost of the Robot). Amusingly, though, once Spike’s romantic feelings for Buffy blossomed, Marsters had to drop the grudge altogether. Looking back on the whole Spuffy romance, he summed things up nicely: “the subversive in me was just starved!”

Fortunately, the subversive in Marsters got to have one more season in the sun (so to speak) when his character was brought back to life on Angel. There, he enjoyed transferring that subversive antagonism toward the series lead, even though he is the first to admit that David Boreanaz “was awesome to me from day one.” The idea of messing with fellow actors may sound petty to some fans, but to them, we simply must pose a question…were you really expecting Marsters to play a punk rock vampire icon without him becoming a bad boy rebel who played by his own rules?

Source: Hollywood Life