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."