DIY VIRAL
The author Chris Snelgrove
| Published
Buffy the Vampire Slayer was more than a popular urban fantasy show. It was a series that reshaped the television landscape with its crackling writing, even as it made us fall in love with its eclectic characters. Perhaps none of these characters was more captivating than James Marster's Spike, who enters the show as a soulless and selfish vampire and ends the series by heroically sacrificing himself to save the world. Many Buffy fans have wanted Spike to be real, and maybe he was… at least that's what some fans are saying after a Redditor discovered a perfect likeness of Spike in a Joy Division documentary.
The real spike
This tale begins on r/Buffy (main Buffy the Vampire Slayer subreddit) where u/PotentialLanguage685 posted pictures of a Spike lookalike who was too real. The user had watched a 2007 documentary Department of Joy which focused on the band of the same name and heavily featured clips from the late 70s. And the user helpfully took pictures of this Spike doppelganger who appeared on screen during the montage, highlighting the UK punk scene of the era.
At this point, it's worth emphasizing that this unnamed man isn't just looks James Marsterthe actor who brought our favorite bad boy vampire to life. Instead, this one Buffy a fan noted how much the man looked like Spike himself, making it seem like the vampire may have once existed in the real world. And after he posted the pictures, fans tried to point out the irony that this man didn't necessarily look like Spike… instead, Spike was deliberately designed to look like this kind of archetypal punk figure.
Firstly, Buffy showrunner Joss Whedon wanted Spike to be based on a real punk scene, which later happened Department of Joy the documentary is so lovingly shot. In a previous interview, Whedon explained that he wanted his vampiric creature to be an “English punk rock vampire.” It required remastering and some voice coaching from the real Englishman, Anthony Stewart Head, and all the work on the British accent was doubly ironic because Marster originally auditioned with a thick Louisiana accent that would have been more homely Real blood.
About that Buffy subreddit, many fans discussed how much the unnamed man looked like both the fictional Spike and the real-life music legend Billy Idol. As many of these fans already knew, Spike's look on the show was deliberately modeled after Idol, so much so that we later got a hilarious description of how Idol stole his look from Spike instead of the other way around. But in the real world, Idol's look was more inspired by bands like the Sex Pistols, which comes full circle: Joss Whedon wanted Spike to look more like Sid Vicious, and Marster insisted he look like Johnny Rotten.
Unfortunately enough to Buffy fans everywhere, Spike isn't actually real. If he was, half of them would be lusting after him constantly and the other half would be yelling at him for season 6. But this unknown stranger in the Joy Division documentary is proof that the various influences in our world that led to the creation of Spike were all too real. In that sense… you could say that the real Bloody William was inside us all along.
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DIY VIRAL
