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.