James Marsters is opening up about a disturbing scene he had to film for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, calling it “the darkest professional day of my life.”
The actor, who played Spike on the hit supernatural drama series starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, made an appearance on a recent episode of the Inside of You podcast, where he recalled his traumatic experience filming the controversial scene.
“It’s a problematic scene for a lot of people who like the show,” he told host Michael Rosenbaum. “It’s the darkest professional day of my life.”
The scene in the season six episode “Seeing Red” (which originally aired in May 2002) sees Gellar’s Buffy reject advances from Spike, her former vampire lover. But Marsters’ character ends up attempting to sexually assault Buffy to convince her that she still has feelings for him. However, Buffy manages to fight him off and shoves him into the wall.
“The writers were being asked to come up with their worst day, the day that they don’t talk about, their dark secret, the one that keeps them up at night, when they really hurt somebody or when they really got hurt or made a big mistake of some kind — and then slap metaphoric fangs on top of that dark secret and tell everybody about it,” Marsters said of how they decided which stories and themes to feature in the show.
But the specific assault scene was based on an experience one of the show’s female writers had in college, Marsters explained. “She had gotten broken up with, and she went to her ex’s place and thought that if they made love one more time, everything would be fixed,” he recalled. “And she kind of forced herself, and he had to physically remove her from the premises. And that was just like one of the most painful memories of that time of her life.”
The Runaways actor continued, “[The show’s writers] thought that since Buffy was a superhero, that they could flip the sexes since Buffy could defend herself very, very easily from this. They thought that they could have a man do it to a woman, and it would be the same thing, I think.”
However, Marsters disagreed with the writers’ idea and was worried about how viewers would perceive the assault from Buffy’s viewpoint.
“I said, ‘You know, guys, we’re providing a vicarious experience for the audience,’” he recounted. “And so I was saying, ‘You know, everyone who’s watching Buffy is Buffy, and they’re not superheroes. So, I’m doing this to every member of the audience, and they’re gonna have a very different reaction.’”
Filming the season six episode was notably difficult for Marsters as he doesn’t “like sexual predation scenes” no matter what, whether he’s acting in a project or watching it on the screen. And “just having to do that to Sarah” and “having to live through that reality” really took a toll on him.
“Anything that has that to do with it, I don’t audition for those things,” the actor said. “If there’s a movie with that kind of material, I don’t go to see the movie. If it pops up on television, I’ve got to turn the television off before I break it. I have a very visceral reaction to that stuff.”
And he did indeed have a physical reaction to filming the Buffy scene, noting that he had a previous neck injury “pop off like a gunshot” while on set that day.
“I just collapsed to the floor,” Marsters recalled. “I’m like, ‘I guess I’m kind of tense right now,’ you know. And we got the scene in the can, and it was — it was hell. I was in personal hell.”