How Spike From ‘Buffy’ Made a Web Series About Video Games
Read the full interview with James Marsters on Glixel
Back in the 1990s, James Marsters played Spike, Sarah Michelle Gellar‘s bleached-blond vampire love interest in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He’s remained a pop culture fixture since, with roles in shows like Smallville, Torchwood and Caprica. These days, Marsters, now 54 years old, is busy with the upcoming Marvel Hulu series Runaways, which will air in 2018 (he plays Victor Stein, father to teenage superhero Chase). But he tells Glixel he still makes time to keep up with games.
Marsters travels with his PlayStation, he risked divorce over the game Horizon Zero Dawn and created the Vidiots web series, which he co-hosts with his friend and fellow actor Mark Devine.
“If I go on YouTube, I can see someone who’s very good at gaming and not perfectly good at jokes. I thought, what if we were really good at humor, but really bad at gaming? That might be interesting and also easy to do. [So we] started doing that and we were having a lot of fun,” he tells Glixel.
Marsters calls Devine – who you may recognize from Six Feet Under, CSI: Miami or Murder in the First – the funniest person he’s ever hung out with. “But he’s also the worst gamer I’ve ever played with.” The two film the show as they travel around for shoots and fan conventions, dragging in celebrity friends, like Billy Boyd, to help. The idea for the travel sections of the series were a result of one of the most powerful of emotions: guilt.
“We were in Paris one beautiful spring day, but in our hotel room – the curtains were drawn, and we were playing Assassin’s Creed: Unity, which takes place in Paris,” he explains. “It just struck me how obscene that was – that we were in Paris, pretending to be in Paris. I thought, ‘This is ridiculous! Let’s go out and see the town!’ So we used an iPhone and started filming ourselves on the streets and we got some good stuff.”
He also admit that, although he did Spike’s voiceover in some of the Buffy video games, he’s not a pro at playing them. “I got stuck on the first level! I got frustrated and just stopped. It was horrible. Then I remember talking to a fan and they said there’s a walkthrough. … They printed out the walkthrough from the Internet and it saved me. I went on and I beat the game.”
To find out more about the show and see what Marsters has to say about hit game The Witcher 3, Buffy the Vampire Slayer games and playing video games with his wife, head over to Glixel.