Buffy Fan Finds Perfect Spike Double In ’70s Documentary Footage
Buffy the Vampire Slayer was more than a popular urban fantasy show. It was a TV series that transformed the television landscape with its crackling writing even as it made us fall in love with its eclectic characters. Perhaps none of those characters were more captivating than James Marsters’ Spike, who enters the show as a soulless and selfish vampire and ends the series heroically sacrificing himself to save the world. Many Buffy fans have wished that Spike was real, and maybe he was…at least, that’s what some fans are saying after a Redditor discovered a perfect Spike lookalike in a Joy Division documentary.
The Real Spike
This tale begins on r/Buffy (the chief Buffy the Vampire Slayer subreddit), where u/PotentialLanguage685 posted images of a Spike lookalike who was all too real. The user had been watching the 2007 documentary Joy Division which focused on the band of the same name and heavily features clips from the late ‘70s. And the user helpfully took pictures of this Spike doppelganger who appeared onscreen during a montage highlighting that era’s UK punk scene.
At this point, it’s worth emphasizing that this unnamed man does not simply look like James Marsters, the actor who brought our favorite bad boy vampire to life. Instead, this Buffy fan noted how much the man looked like Spike himself, making it seem like this vampire may have once existed in the real world. And after he posted the pictures, fans scrambled to point out the irony that this man didn’t necessarily look like Spike…instead, Spike was deliberately designed to look like this kind of archetypal punk figure.
For one thing, Buffy showrunner Joss Whedon wanted Spike to be based on the real punk scene that the later Joy Division documentary so lovingly captured. In a previous interview, Whedon clarified that he wanted his vampiric creation to be “an English punk rock vampire.” That required a makeover and some voice training from actual Englishman Anthony Stewart Head, and all that work on a British accent was doubly ironic because Marsters originally auditioned with a thick Louisiana accent that would have been more at home in True Blood.
On that Buffy subreddit, many fans discussed how much the unnamed man looked like both the fictional Spike and the real musical legend Billy Idol. As many of those fans already knew, Spike’s look in the show was deliberately modeled after Idol, so much so that we later got a fun throwaway line about how Idol stole his look from Spike rather than the other way around. But in the real world, Idol’s look was more inspired by groups like the Sex Pistols, which brings things full circle: Joss Whedon wanted Spike to be more like Sid Vicious and Marsters insisted he should be more like Johnny Rotten.
Sadly enough for Buffy fans everywhere, Spike isn’t actually real. If he was, half of them would be constantly lusting after him and the other half would be screaming at him about season 6. But this unknown stranger in a Joy Division documentary is proof that the various influences from our world that led to Spike’s creation were all too real. In that sense, well…you could say the real William the Bloody was inside of us all along.
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