James Marsters is opening up a couple of disturbing scene he needed to movie for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, calling it “the darkest skilled day of my life.”
The actor, who performed Spike on the hit supernatural drama sequence starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, made an look on a latest episode of the Within You podcast, the place he recalled his traumatic expertise filming the controversial scene.
“It’s a problematic scene for lots of people who just like the present,” he instructed host Michael Rosenbaum. “It’s the darkest skilled day of my life.”
The scene within the season six episode “Seeing Pink” (which initially aired in Could 2002) sees Gellar’s Buffy reject advances from Spike, her former vampire lover. However Marsters’ character finally ends up trying to sexually assault Buffy to persuade her that she nonetheless has emotions for him. Nonetheless, Buffy manages to battle him off and shoves him into the wall.
“The writers have been being requested to give you their worst day, the day that they don’t discuss, their darkish secret, the one which retains them up at night time, after they actually harm any person or after they actually acquired harm or made an enormous mistake of some variety — after which slap metaphoric fangs on high of that darkish secret and inform all people about it,” Marsters mentioned of how they determined which tales and themes to characteristic within the present.
However the particular assault scene was based mostly on an expertise one of many present’s feminine writers had in faculty, Marsters defined. “She had gotten damaged up with, and he or she went to her ex’s place and thought that in the event that they made love yet another time, every part can be fastened,” he recalled. “And she or he form of pressured herself, and he needed to bodily take away her from the premises. And that was similar to one of the painful recollections of that point of her life.”
The Runaways actor continued, “[The show’s writers] thought that since Buffy was a superhero, that they might flip the sexes since Buffy might defend herself very, very simply from this. They thought that they might have a person do it to a lady, and it will be the identical factor, I believe.”
Nonetheless, Marsters disagreed with the writers’ concept and was frightened about how viewers would understand the assault from Buffy’s viewpoint.
“I mentioned, ‘You already know, guys, we’re offering a vicarious expertise for the viewers,’” he recounted. “And so I used to be saying, ‘You already know, everybody who’s watching Buffy is Buffy, and so they’re not superheroes. So, I’m doing this to each member of the viewers, and so they’re gonna have a really completely different response.’”
Filming the season six episode was notably troublesome for Marsters as he doesn’t “like sexual predation scenes” it doesn’t matter what, whether or not he’s appearing in a undertaking or watching it on the display. And “simply having to do this to Sarah” and “having to reside by that actuality” actually took a toll on him.
“Something that has that to do with it, I don’t audition for these issues,” the actor mentioned. “If there’s a film with that form of materials, I don’t go to see the film. If it pops up on tv, I’ve acquired to show the tv off earlier than I break it. I’ve a really visceral response to that stuff.”
And he did certainly have a bodily response to filming the Buffy scene, noting that he had a earlier neck harm “pop off like a gunshot” whereas on set that day.
“I simply collapsed to the ground,” Marsters recalled. “I’m like, ‘I assume I’m form of tense proper now,’ you already know. And we acquired the scene within the can, and it was — it was hell. I used to be in private hell.”