Marsters never saw any of it coming. He arrived on the set for a one- off, returned a few more times and eventually found himself on board as a regular, a fan favourite, and, shockingly, Buffy's beau and boffing buddy. "From the very beginning, there was a very positive reaction to the character, both from fans and the network and people on the set," Marsters recalls. "Joss pulled me aside and said: "Don't get too big for your britches, buddy. You are here to die. I'm trying to avoid becoming a Scooby-Doo series where the villain comes up every week and gets killed off. So, we're trying to develop villains that go for a little bit longer, but then do die. So, you're going to die. Don't get too comfortable here." So, that's about all the preparation I had. He once came up to me and was trying to help me understand his writing style and what he needs from his actors. What he needs is very dry, natural delivery with his writing and the writing of the writers he hired, if you comment on it at all, if the characters are aware of how witty they are, then it all goes to hell. He came to me once and said, "Please, a little less Lawrence Olivier and a little more Tim Roth." That was my touchstone for quite a while. I wandered around the set for a little bit just repeating the words, "Stop acting, stop acting, stop it".

Every year Buffy watchers were waiting for the other nail to drop. Spike just had to die, right? Marsters himself figured it was just a matter of time. "Yeah, it's true," he acknowledges. "We villains and secondary characters read the last page of scripts first, and we find our last line in the script and see if we're going to die, and then, if we don't, we can relax and read the script. But yeah, every single script, I was worried about that." Though it was late in the game some viewers believed that the episode Seeing Red might serve as Spike's death knell. In that late season six episode, unable to coax any expressions of love from Buffy, he attempted to rape her. "That was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life, that bathroom scene last year," the actor says. "That's probably the worst day that I can remember in my life. I don't think that I ever want to go back to doing a scene anything like that again in my whole life, but at the same time, artistically, I'm very proud of it." " I think there had been a bit of frustration from the writers.

They kept trying to frame this guy as a bad guy and the relationship as something that was extremely dangerous for Buffy and the people around her, and I'm not sure that the fans really reacted that way. So, they just pushed that envelope until it tore. I know the episode pissed a lot of people off, but this was the danger with Spike. This was the thing that made me very uncomfortable, which was if a man is mean to other people, he's going to be mean to his woman, and that's a fact that most women do not want to look at. Most women who are attracted to those kinds of men do not want to admit it. So in that way, Spike was in danger of becoming a really dangerous lie, a fantasy of the badass killer - who would treat a girl like a queen, and that stuff doesn't happen in the real world. That was something I wasn't comfortable being a part of. So, in that way, I'm really glad that we did that because I think that underneath all of the fangs and the blood and the witches spells, we are speaking about the truth, that the good can win, but it gets bruised, and the good fight is worth fighting. There's a lot of money to be made in Hollywood by telling lies. There are a lot of comforting lies that you can write stories about, but Joss and Marti were never about that. They were really more about making people feel a little uncomfortable than they are about making them feel peaceful. So, it pissed people off, but in the same way that finally admitting that your boyfriend really is a jerk pisses you off. You don't want to be forced to admit that."

The other characters got their wish at last, when Spike gives his all in the series finale Chosen. Marsters remembers his unlikely reaction to reading the script, shooting his scenes and thinking through his big moment. "It was interesting because I spent the whole episode going, "I don't get it. Dammit, this sucks!" he laughs. "I had built up the experience of filming the finale in my mind hugely because I had had a hunger to work with Joss the whole time that I worked on Buffy and the thing about it is that Spike is not really - as I said before - structurally in the centre of things in the show. If you bring him out into daylight too much and really put him as part of the Scooby gang, he really blands out. So, when Joss directs and writes an episode, he usually goes back to the original structure, which means I'm usually not really there very much. And that's fine, but what it meant is that we really haven't had a lot of time to work together as an actor and director. Then this script came out and I had this nice, juicy scene and a couple of other ones, and I was just so sad for it, but as often happens with actors, if you try too hard for something, you don't get it. Joss kept telling me, "Don't worry, you're great. I wouldn't move on if I wasn't happy. You're giving me everything that I need." I think that I had wanted the perfect experience and filming is just never that. You never get it completely right all the way through because you don't have four weeks of rehearsal to get it all down. So, I think that I had built it up way too much in my mind."

And then there was that exchange of dialogue with Buffy…Marsters gives the key piece of their conversation. "She says, I love you' and he says, No, you don't, but thanks for saying so. Now, that is a moment that they have spent a trillion dollars building up to. I think that Joss was trying to construct a moment where Buffy, once again, can't get to half the love that normal young women can have because of her job. It's that way to the very end and I was happy to be there for it."