Over Christmas, SFX managed to nab quite a few column inches in the national dailies thanks to our "Top 100 Characters In SF And Fantasy" poll. there were two newsworthy angles. Some concentrated on the fact that a 30 year-old TV character topped the poll, but perhaps that wasn't quite as shocking as another result (Doctor Who fans are, after all, always good at motivating themselves into action on such occasions). Y'see, what a lot of the other papers picked up on was that second place went to a certain blond bombshell from Buffy The Vampire Slayer...

But not the blonde bombshell you'd expect. The eponymous Buffy Summers was beaten into third place by -- gasp -- Spike. From all round the world, from men and women, came voting forms proclaiming love and admiration for William The Bloody. It seems that Spike has become a bit of an icon. Which makes us wonder -- with the future of Buffy in the balance (and with no decision made as SFX goes to press), would James Marsters like his very own series, elevating Spike from supporting character to star?

"Oh yeah, of course!" he laughs, delighted at the thought. Then his voice takes on a wistful tone. "But what do you call it -- Not Angel?"

He's got a point. Angel is a show about a vampire with a soul. Spike would also be a show about a vampire with a soul. Could get confusing. Still, even if Marsters continues to play a supproting character, we won't have seen the last of him. "There are so many variables," the actor muses. "There could be no show, or there could be a show where everyone is back, including Sarah, but Sarah is only there for some of the episodes. Everything is possible. As far as I know, many, many people have expressed interest in continuing. We have a group of writers and directors, and everyone else, who have very carefully put this together, and we are doing our jobs well. Why would you want that to end, especailly because it's not borning and it's not the same story every year? It doesn't have that same grind that series TV can have.

"I'm a professional actor and the is the highest paying gig that I've ever had," he continues, cheerfully. "I've had other high profile gigs, and when you're, like, at the good one and the artistic director wants to keep you on the season and keeps casting you, it's like..." He doesn't finish the sentence, choosing to smile instead. It's nice to be in demand. But does he worry that people might get bored with his work after so much exposure?

"I'm not concerned with that," he counters, and cites the quality of Spike's story arc as a reason. "The writers really seem to write from their own experience. They really do. I've worked with writers before in theater, and so I can tell when a writer is clicking and when they're not, and these people are really consistently achieving what they aim to say. I'm not afraid of it going dry just yet. I know that it's year seven, but some of these writers have only come on recently. There's a new guy, Drew Greenberg -- wow. He's incredible! And I thought that this table was full, and we have the best writers in television!"

It's nice to hear an actor gushing so gleefully about his fellow workers; but then, Marsters have never been someone who takes the credit for anything when he can find someone else to pin the praise to. He's probably said more nice things about Joss Whedon than Joss' own mother. If you tell him you liked the way he played a scene, he'll reply that if the writers hadn't written it that way it wouldn't have been any good. Imagine James Marsters winning an Oscar -- his "I'd like to thank..." speech would go on forever. It's not surprising that such a modest and unassuming fella could play a character so evil and make him so likeable. Of course, Marsters never forgets what a true bastard Spike is, despite everything that's been thrown at him recently in terms of lovey-dovey feelings and soul stirrings. "You know, Spike was clearly a two-dimensional character once. If you'd had to watch evil Spike for the last six years, [the fans] might not have been crying for his return as much! Initially, I liked him because I thought that he had a perverse sense of fun."

Perverse? That's a bit of an understatement, isn't it? This is a character who once enjoyed torturing people with railroad spikes! Marsters is at pains (no pun intended) to point out that he initially managed to see past the nasty stuff. "I liked him because he could be both a good boyfriend -- as I saw him at the time -- and also a maniacal killer. In some ways, that was at odds with the very moral universe that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There is quite a lot of criticism, I think, but we are one of the most moral fables, really. We're the most moral show."

Um... Spike... moral? "Oh yea. He's moral, not because he's afraid of Hell, but because he knows that it's wiser to be moral. So, I liked him for his sense of that kind of fun, and I liked him because it was fun to play that much pain."

Spike has, without a doubt, changed immeasurably since that first appearance in "School Hard". So has his taste in women. Once Marsters declared that Spike and Buffy would never get together. "Yeah, that was two years ago," he admits, ruefully. "And now, for the first time on the show, I know what's going to happen, and so I'm in dangerous water right now! I don't know everything about the end of the season, but what we're going to do is going to be highly romantic and highly painful, highly dramatic. A lot of love. And I think that it's going to piss a lot of people off."

It sounds as though Buffy and Spike might have a happy ending -- not that you can guarantee anything in the Buffyverse of course. After all, at the end of season six Spike did try to rape her...

"It still haunts me," Marsters says, with endearing sensitivity, about the episode ("Seeing Red"). "It was the most brave thing that I think that television series has done, or could do. Artistically, I think that it allows them to take Spike to another place and I'm artistically proud to have done it, but it was the hardest day of my career. It was hard for me, it was hard for Sarah, and we're fine now, but it was not a good time. When you're contractually obligated to hurt someone, knowing that it probably wasn't a scene that she would want to do, that was it. If you do movies, or if you do plays, you can choose what kind of projects and what you would be willing to do. Even though I'm proud of it artistically, I really got hung up on the fact that they can call me at any time, day or night, tell me to take my clothes off and I have to do anything to Sarah that they tell me to. And I like Sarah, she's a friend of mine. That was hard."

Did he talke about the scene beforehand with her? "No, and I think that was the mistake. We were both freaked out about it and we didn't talk about it. I think she probably tried, actually, and I think that I didn't want to. It just terrified me. I can't watch movies where women are killed or hurt. If anyone hits a woman, I just want to fucking kill everyone. I want to kill the guy who played the role because he signed off on it, I want to kill the guy who wrote it, the guy who filmed it and all of the guys who made money from it, and it doesn't even matter if it's in a good movie. It's a completely irrational thing of mine, and it's the same with kids. Kids are, like, a million times more. I cannot watch that stuff."

Of course, since that day the character of Spike has changed immensely. Probably something to do with the fact that he recently became all souled up á la Angel, but with less of the brooding: Spike went a bit bonkers instead. Lurking in the basement of Sunnydale High and keeping company with an assortment of apparitions won't really help a guy recover from a shocking experience. "What I think we're seeing now, with Spike, is that he's waking up. I always envisioned him down in the basement with one victim at a time, remembering all his killings, how he killed them, why, how good it felt. Spike killed little girls and then, suddenly getting a soul and having to deal with that..." he shrugs. "But what I'm hoping for the rest of the story is that he discovers joy again in things that are maybe just a little bit more healthy than killing those people. This year has been very, very risky because we completely dismantled the character and we're coming at him from such a different angle. It's very exciting, but we don't want to live with a Spike who always feels bad about what he's done."

Did Marsters really think that Spike was crazy as he played him? "I kept thinking, 'No, he's just really depressed', and Joss would say, 'No, he's bonkers, he's schizophrenic, he's out of his mind, he's absolutely shattered.' I kept trying to save my dignity! No-one ever talked to me about it. I didn't know, the day that we were filming [the finale of season six], that there were two versions. In one, I got a soul"

There was another ending? What was it?

"He gets the chip deactivated, which I thought would've been really interesting. If the chip was out, can you hold an evil creature just out of love? See, they already decided that; because when Spike thought that the chip was deactivated, he went straight for a victim. I think they wanted to make that very clear: he was evil. They kept trying to say that so often. They gave me two ellipses and that pause, and I'm always trying to play a little more soul than is written, hoping to balance out the evil."

We've seen years and years of Angel trying to atone for his sins and suffering for what he once did. Now it's Spike's turn. But, rather than us seeing Spike torture himself, for a fair proportion of this year we've had Spike being tortured by someone else... the First Evil, in various incarnations. Makes a change. "Well, the things is, you have to pay for it," grins Marsters. "If you're going to talk about that kind of redemption, his instinct was always to earn it. It's like when Buffy died and Joss brought her back; he didn't just wipe that up for her really fast. I think Joss waits until he knows the audience wants it."

Still it would be nice if Spike wasn't suffering quite so much. Marsters agrees. "I was talking to Marti [Noxon]. I told her I was watching the show, early episodes, and it was amazing how much I smiled, and I miss that. Joss was like, 'Why?' They're going to keep beating me up physically, that's for damn sure. I've been dragged across gravel, but that's fun. And emotionally, I don't know."

Marsters makes no secret of the fact that he's a thesp, always anxious to return to the stage. If he's not rquired for Buffy's future, what does he think his next trick will be? Treading the boards again? Moving his love of music up a notch? Or movies?

"You know, I should be thinking of more features, but I keep thinking about more stage," he declares. "I keep thinking that I really could get hired in New York right now, and I really could get hired in London right now. I mean, really, in London, wow!"

He wouldn't be the first; there's a steady stream of US actors hitting the boards over here at the moment, including Sarah Michelle Gellar's hubby, Freddie Prinze Jr. "I always thought that I would break the West End," Marsters says, thoughtfully, "Now the finances are such that I'm one of these actors that I used to detest, one who could go get a stage job because they've done a damn TV show! But Hell yeah, I'll use it. I'll join the enemy."

What about his music? We all know that he sang in Buffy's infamous musical episode, but now Marsters' band, Ghost Of The Robot, has released its first album (Mad Brilliant - check out their website at www.ghostoftherobot.com). "The thing is that singing is a very different beast," he says of this new venture." There's something different about the airflow and the way that you have to produce it that really makes it more emotional and vulnerable to me.

"Throughtout my life, I have picked up my guitar when I was throwing plates. That always happens. You're about to destroy your apartment and you pick up your guitar and you always get a great song out of that, and I've always used that as kind of medicine. There are more pressures when you're performing for a lot of people, and you're functioning at a really high musical level because the people around are really good. Right now, the band is in danger of becoming the Alanis Morissette of whatever kind of music we are. We keep writing about heartbreak and that damn girl who didn't give me what I wanted. There's a great yearning in that, and there is a lot of good ground for songs, but if we don't watch out...! I'm trying to write a good, clean, naive, honest love song!"

All that's left to discuss now is the end of Buffy. Marsters has already hinted that he knows a few things about the show's finalé, but there's more. "Joss brought all the reins in on the 100th episode and all the arcs," he says, voice full of his usual Whedon-awe. "So, if what he told me before holds true, he'll direct the final episode, which will be really exciting because no one can deny him a thing."

Can James at least give us a clue? How will the show go out? "With a beautiful bang, man!" he laughs.

Of that, we have no doubt.