James Marsters and Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2000). (20th Century Fox Film Corp.)
James Marsters is unpacking one of his most uncomfortable scenes, which ultimately sent him to therapy.
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer alum recently described his “personal hell” as he reflected on a 2002 episode in which his vampire character Spike attempts to force himself on the titular slayer (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar).
“Buffy sent me into therapy, actually. Buffy crushed me,” said Marsters on Michael Rosenbaum‘s Inside of You podcast, adding: “It’s a problematic scene for a lot of people who like the show. And it’s the darkest professional day of my life.”
The scene from the Season 6 episode ‘Seeing Red’ is largely considered one of the hardest to watch in the Joss Whedon series, which ran for seven seasons on The WB from 1997 to 2003. To prove his love, Spike attempts to rape Buffy in her bathroom, although she’s able to fight him off.
“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,” he recalled.
“One of the the women writers actually had come up with this idea, because in college 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,” Marsters continued. “She kind of forced herself and he had to physically remove her from the premises, and that was one of the most painful memories of that time of her life.”
Marsters worried how the scene would be perceived by fans of the show, especially given the context of flipping the genders in the scenario.
“They thought that since Buffy was a superhero that they could flip the sexes, since Buffy could could defend herself very, very easily from this,” he explained. “They thought that they could have a man do it to a woman and it would be the same thing. I went to them and I said, ‘You know, guys, we’re providing a vicarious experience for the audience. 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 going to have a very different reaction.’”
Contractually, Marsters “couldn’t say no,” adding: “We got the scene in the can, and it was hell. I was in [my] personal hell.”
“I don’t like sexual predation scenes, anything that has to do with it,” he noted. “I don’t audition for those things. 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.”
Although Gellar has watched much of the series with her family, she explained that ‘Seeing Red’ is one episode they skip. “I have trouble with [season] six. It wasn’t appropriate for them at the time, and I just don’t want to rewatch it,” she told The Hollywood Reporter last year.