He came. He spoke. He signed.

He was dead tired.

James Marsters arrived virtually unrecognized at around 6:00 a.m. EST, November 13, 1999, to be a guest presenter at a Vulkon Convention held at the Hilton-Orlando in Alamonte Springs, Florida. Much to the disappointment of several fans who woke up early to try to meet the extraordinary actor, Marsters was immediately whisked up to his room on the seventh floor executive level of the hotel for some much-needed shut-eye.

"I worked 20 hours on Friday. I got home and had like two hours at home and then got on the flight. I think I slept on the plane, but I don't really know about that," Marsters admits during the presentation he gave to approximately five hundred fans. Armed with an overnight bag and his Playstation, he came directly from filming his last scene of the week for Buffy, the Vampire Slayer -- a scene that had ended at 4:30 a.m. PST.

"Typical Monday, 4:30 a.m., get in, start drinking coffee," Marsters says, describing his workday. "I've already drunk four shots of espresso by the time I've gotten to the set, then I start chug-a-lugging when I get there. [Then I] get to sit down in makeup and just talk in the makeup trailer, which is the actor's safe zone. We can whine and dish on people. It's taken in confidence that certain people won't hear anything you say. Todd McIntosh is a great makeup artist with two reasons: That he's great with makeup and he also has a good environment in his trailer. That is pretty cool.

"Then we go and we rehearse. That's basically just showing the director and the cinematographer where we want to move in the scene. Then we talk about it and see if they can film it that way and ask us to adjust so that they can film it. And then we go away for like half an hour and they light it, come back and do the takes.

"They start with the master, which is the scene that's shot that encompasses the whole scene. Then they move in for what they call coverage, which is like a few shots in close-ups and stuff like that," Marsters explains. He finishes off his typical workday example with a laugh. "And then that process repeats itself for 20 hours!"

No wonder the poor guy was tired. But despite the grueling hours of television, he would never give up acting. "You don't know what kind of release acting is. I cannot imagine not doing it."

Marsters has been acting since the fourth grade, when he debuted in the role of Eeyore in a production of Winnie the Pooh. But it wasn't until the sixth grade that he knew he wanted to become an actor. A lyrical baritone ("Never smoke cigarettes. Anyone who's thinking about it, you never meet a smoker who wants to do that. Seriously. I'm smoking and my voice is so bad."), he performed in several musicals and other plays during his years in high school and at the Pacific Conservatory for the Performing Arts (PCPA).

"[During that time,] my favorite acting was just doing scene work from American Buffalo. That was amazing. Probably that was my best acting, the first time I actually did anything resembling good acting after like six years of doing waka, waka, waka. I did a play called Michelangelo. Robert Benedetti directed it and it was as good as the original play. We did Ionesco's Rhinoceros, and an original play called Larkrives. I had a good time. [College theater] was the best training I had."

Post-graduation from PCPA, Marsters was accepted into the Juilliard Academy for the Performing Arts. He was then kicked out for disagreeing with their methods of training an actor. "I'll diss them if I can," he says about his time spent there. "If someone asks, I'll diss them anytime. They were so mean."

After being excommunicated from Juilliard, Marsters made his way to New York to become... a bartender. "Those were horrible years. Those are the days I do not talk about," he recalls with a chuckle. "There's stuff that happened that I do not talk about."

The bartender with a passion for acting moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he found the pot of gold -- or rather stage makeup, costumes (and in Making Noise Quietly: Being Friends, a lack thereof), and credited roles in nine plays. "One of my favorite roles was the character of Todd [Kemp]; he was a murderer in Mortal Risk. That was an overly brutal but well-written play. Life Was A Dream was one of my favorite ones to act, too. That's Calderone de la Barca. It's like a Spanish Shakespeare."

In the early nineties, Marsters left the Windy City for the Rainy City, Seattle, and put on a director's hat. "I ran the New Mercury theater for four years. We performed in a church basement on Capitol Hill, but we were much better known when we were down in our own space in a loft in Pioneer Square," he says. "Directing is great, but it just burns you out. You also have to be a producer for a small theater, you end up being a janitor, the ticket taker, sweeping out the seats, painting the sets and all the stuff that you can't pay people to do. But directing was fun."

However, although he loved the stage, Marsters felt the need to build himself a nest egg, especially after speaking with a fellow stage actor. "I was talking to my favorite actor in the world and he has problems fixing his car. His name is Michael Winters. He's so cool. He was like 50 years old and he didn't have a new car and I was like 'Michael, you're the best, you can work anywhere in America,' and he was like 'James, I will never make more than you do right now.'"

The experienced stage actor headed down the Pacific Coast to Los Angeles, CA, and landed five roles before auditioning for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The first television role he had was on an episode of Northern Exposure ("It Happened In Juneau"). "Three lines. One word each. Bellhop. Joel was talking to him at an elevator," Marsters says of the part.

His most memorable pre-Buffy role was also on Northern Exposure, as Reverend Harding in the episode "Grosse Pointe, 48230". "I loved doing the character. I took a very broad choice and kind of ran with it. And the crew was laughing at me, so I knew it was good. We were all stuffed inside a little tiny house in Seattle. It was not comfortable, but everyone was really, really good," he says. The actor recalls his favorite part of the episode: "The first scene... [Joel's] Jewish and he's in the middle of the whitest part of America, and he's like 'What is it with you people and mayonnaise, you use it like mortar,'" Marsters laughs. "That's my favorite line."

Then came the audition for the new villain on a yet-to-be-hit show on a fledgling network. "They'd been looking for Spike for a long time," he recalls. "They looked at big guys and medium, you know, everybody. I was kinda new to town, and they were scraping the bottom of the barrel."

Marsters must have done something right, however, because he was offered the role.

And Spike was born.

From the instant Christophe Beck's hard music cued up and a booted foot touched the pavement, the audience knew this vampire was a force to be reckoned with. Marsters' stage presence as Spike, the peroxide-blond blood-sucker with attitude, was phenomenal. He commanded the screen without saying a word. Even when stuck in a wheelchair through the middle of season two, his performances opposite David Boreanaz (Angel) and Juliet Landau (Drusilla) were remarkable. By the late-second-season episode "I Only Have Eyes For You", fans wanted to crawl into the television to comfort the vampire in a pivotal Angel/Drusilla/Spike scene, then cheered when Spike stood up and kicked the chair at the end of the episode.

"I hated it," Marsters says with vehemence about the time he spent in that wheelchair. "Because you never know what's coming up. You know, that's the only problem with the show, you don't know what's coming later. I thought I was going to get staked in the wheelchair. I thought I was gonna die there. All I wanted when I came on the show was a good body count and a good death. That's all. And at that point I didn't have either. I was a bad ass for like two episodes then I was in that damn wheelchair most of the time and I thought I was just going to go pathetic and be forgotten about or something like that. I wanted to get out of that thing so bad. I went months without ever seeing the stunt guy. When the stunt guy is dressed as your character, you know you're about to get your butt kicked."

"I hit David Boreanaz really hard... at the end of the [second] season after I get out of that damn wheelchair and Angel was like macking on my girl and everything. They gave me a soft club, which is not soft, but it's not like a metal club to beat with someone. It's like made out of really hard plastic. And they were suppose to pad David and they didn't. He thought that I was just going to use like a metal prop and then not hit him, like mime-hitting and stuff. And so I decided Spike would just nail Angel. Hard as he could. And [David] was surprised."

As we know, Spike ended up as anything but dust. The character returned for a single, Emmy-nominated episode in season three ("Lovers Walk"), providing the viewers with a glimpse at how different this particular vampire was from others. The fan reaction to Marsters' reprisal of the role was phenomenal, prompting the Buffy crew to create a permanent home for the actor. With his explosive return in the season four Buffy/Angel crossover ("Harsh Light of Day"/"In The Dark"), Marsters once again commanded the screen -- and gave the audience a peek at what's been hiding under that well-known duster, letting everyone see that age has done nothing to hurt this man's physique.

"I wanted to do that love scene with my shirt off," Marsters says. "I was trying to get my shirt off in the beginning, because if you have your shirt off or if you're kissing Buffy or if you're kicking her butt, then you're in the center of everything. Marc Blucas [who plays Riley] is scared to death. We're both working out. We're like in a race. I told him 'Watch out, you're going to take your shirt off.' So now he's like jogging five miles a day, lifting weights, stuff like that."

The crossover episodes were filmed back to back, with the Angel episode filmed first, so Marsters knew the ending before the beginning. "[The opening monologue to Angel] was the last shot. I was so tired... [but] it was the best. I thought it was so great. Because they put every criticism you can make about Angel potentially and just put it right in the mouth of the villain, and each impersonation I did in a cockney accent."

Marsters has nothing but praise for Angel guest star Kevin Westin, who played Marcus, and Buffy guest star Mercedes McNab, who plays Spike's recent love interest Harmony. "Mercedes is less intense, which is not bad. It's just different... and Kevin West was a cool guy. A theater guy. He always knew his lines and he was very simple. That role could have really been weird and sucky. But he rooted it and was very simple, and I thought he did really good work."

As for what Marsters has to say about the upcoming episodes of Buffy: "I'm in the show. Ta-da! Every week. I'm a cast member. I have a trailer!" he adds enthusiastically. "But you are not going to believe what they are doing to my character, which I can't tell you about. I can't. Joss will kill me. If anything cool happens, it won't if you let it out. [Joss] is like this maniac with privacy. In fact, he didn't want anyone to know that I was in the cast, so I'm not in the main title until the seventh episode. You'll have to watch. Come on, everybody watch! Tell everybody to watch, so we beat all these numbers, so that whenever Spike is on, the numbers go up and they give me more of a role. A bigger role."

When asked about hiatus/post-Buffy work, Marsters admits to wanting to take small parts in good films, rather than simply leading roles. Most recently seen in the beginning of House on Haunted Hill, he also had a part in the film Winding Roads. "It's like an independent film," he explains. With a laugh, he adds, "Someone told me it was playing, and I still haven't seen it. The director never called me to watch his movie. Everyone has seen it but me."

Marsters' dream, however, is centered around a little play written by a fellow named Shakespeare. "Macbeth. That's what I want to do. I want to get like five to eight million dollars and film Macbeth. I've done the role once and I've been in another production of it and nobody's made a good movie out of that [role] in 25 years. It's the greatest."

What is it about Macbeth that enables Marsters to quote from the play on demand? "In the speech of 'Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow', [it's] understanding that he's not whining and he's not sad, he's absolutely without emotion. When you see how low that the main title character sinks, that speech is all about that life is absolutely worthless, meaningless. There's no meaning at all. And then you understand that he's not whining about anything, he's just commenting on the way he sees life. He starts as such an energetic and life-filled character, and then he journeys and comes to that point at which he's no longer the hero, he's the villain. In order to commit the crimes he did, he had to cut out his own soul... he had to numb himself as so many murderers do. It's weird that Shakespeare knew that. But that was the ultimate price. For committing the acts that he did out of ambition was that he had to turn off his own connection to real life to protect himself. So when his wife dies, when he hears that his wife is dead, he's just like 'Well, she should have died tomorrow, we would have had more time for that tomorrow.' That's probably my favorite part of the play because actually it requires no acting at all. You get to that and it's the big abyss of the role, you just have to sit there and say it. You just say it very simply. It's so disturbing."

At the weekend-long convention, Marsters answered questions about the show, accepted gifts ("I'm a Spike Girl," he says with amusement when given an honorary membership to the online fan club), signed autographs for three hours and chatted with each person. Friendly, personable and perfectly down-to-earth, he showed the fans that his jump to fame has only given him a home on the beach.

"Five hundred people are trying to make one guy look cool. Whoever they decide that they want to make look cool, they'll do it, and I'm very lucky that they decided to make me that guy," Marsters says. "'Cause why didn't Spike get killed, you know? His hair worked and his coat worked. Whatever the heck that it was. The accent and the coat or whatever. If they would have costumed me a different way, they might've just killed me, really. They had like a see-through plastic shirt and stuff like it because it was supposed to be punk, it was like glam-punk. If they would have done that, people would have hated me, and I would have died. I got so lucky."

Actually, it is Marsters' exceptional ability that allows him to take a two-dimensional character on paper and make the audience believe in a cocky, emotional, slightly-hyper vampire named Spike.

Well, that and inheriting his mother's cheekbones.