James Wesley
Marsters, son of James William Marsters (a
Minister) and Margaret Lynn Marsters (a social
worker who almost became a nun), was born in
Greenville, California, on August 20, 1962, and
grew up in Modesto, California. He has dark
brown and curly hair, is left-handed, has blue
eyes, and is 5" 10' tall. He has a younger
brother (Paul) and an older sister
(Susan).
Dreaming about becoming an actor
since he played in [Winnie
the Pooh]'s Eeyore in fourth grade, James joined the
theater group at his high school, Grace M.
Davis High, acting in many plays,
including musicals.
After graduation, James attended the
[Pacific Conservatory of
the Performing Arts - Allan Hancock
College], in Santa Maria, CA, and
later, the prestigious [The Juilliard School],
in New York, from where he was expelled after
2 years:
They kicked my butt out of
Juilliard; they didn't like me! All the
British people hated me.
They have a very technical way of
working at Juilliard. They say they want to
strip out your instincts, and then build the
actor back up, and I think there is
something flawed in that. I have always felt
that you should just be yourself, and not
'act.' It's much more brave to just reveal
yourself. One of the teachers there did say
something which has always stuck with me
though; 'Acting is being private in public.'
It sounds very simple, but is probably
something which would take a lifetime to
catch.
We were doing this play called the
"Discovery Play", and there was this
wonderful Broadway actress who was directing
it, but she wasn't directing us at all!
Being that it was the first play of the
first year, and that its name was such as it
was, I thought they wanted to "discover"
what we could do if they just let us go; if
we were going to be able to pull the story
together, how much help we would need...
About a week before opening it seemed to me
that everyone was just jerking off, and
being very indulgent, and I finally stood up
and ragged us all out collectively, saying,
"People are going to come to watch this!
They are going to give us three hours of
their lives! We have to care whether we are
boring or not!" Well, apparently the
director didn't like this at all, and it was
just downhill from there on out. (Horror Online 10/1999)
No seriously, at Juilliard they
told me I was no actor. I was too
intelligent to be an actor, and I would
never make it, and I should quit before I
got bitter. At which point I really almost
threw myself off Juilliard's roof. But
ultimately I told them I had been quite
successful before I came to college. I had
done professional work before I came to
college. I seemed to remember the audience
responded very well to me. And I wanted to
go back out in the world of theater and find
out if they were right or not. What I found
out immediately was that they were
completely wrong. No, acting has been my
lifeboat, all my life, through a lot of
crap. (GenCon 2001)
In 1987, James and girlfriend
Liane Davidson* made the move to Chicago,
where they joined in the city's noted theater
community, working in productions at the Goodman
Theater and the Balliwick Repertory,
later co-founding (with Greg
Musick) the Genesis
Theater Company. Around that time, James
and Liane got married.
*Liane Davidson is a
native of Modesto. She attended Davis High
School and went on to study professional
theatre in New York, London, and St. Louis.
Davidson founded the Genesis Theatre in
Chicago and the New Mercury Theatre in
Seattle. During her tenure at New Mercury,
it was one of most successful intimate
theatres in Seattle, both artistically and
financially. New Mercury was widely
recognized for serving a diverse community
with a variety of community focused
programming.
In 1990, the couple left Chicago for
Seattle, where they founded (with Musick) the
New Mercury Theatre (named after Orson Well's
company).
In 1992, James got his first
acting job on TV — on Northern
Exposure, a show that was shot near
Seattle.
In 1996, James — tired of
being poor, almost having a break down and
with a new-born son (Sullivan) — decided to
return to California, and try a career on
television. He went first to Los
Angeles, while Liane was busy on tour, directing
The Right to Dream. Plans didn't go as
planned, however, and the
couple got divorced in 1997.
Soon after, James got a new
girlfriend (Liz Stauber) and the role that
would make him an international celebrity: [Spike],
on [Buffy, the Vampire Slayer],
and later, on Angel.
After Angel ended,
James put Spike to rest; he shaved his
bleached blond hair on April 27, 2004 (live
on TV for charity — $25,000.00 were raised for
the [Elizabeth Glazer Pediatric
AIDS Foundation] —
and was ready to face new acting challenges,
as well as continuing to play his music.
In 2004, James started dating
Patricia Jasmin Rahman, a German girl he met
during the GoTR European tour. He announced
his engagement to her in May, 2010; he
proposed in [Trier],
Germany. They got married
on January 14, 2011, in Los Angeles. [Jasmin
Marsters] (actress, singer-songwriter and
artist) and James live in Los Angeles. Nowadays,
his son, [Sullivan],
is a member of [Ghost
of the Robot].
JAMES' FAVORITES
James' favorites authors are Russian
Anton
Chekhov, South-African Athol
Fugard, Canadian George
Walker and English Steven
Berkoff.
His favorite
book is Extraordinary
Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,
by Charles Mackay (written in the 18th Century);
more recently, he has been enjoying The
Catcher in the Rye, Stupid
White Men ...and Other Sorry Excuses for the
State of the Nation!, The
Best Democracy Money Can Buy, and Master
Harold... and the Boys. The book he liked
best when he was a child was Harold and the Purple
Crayon, about a boy who paints the world as he
wants it o be, not as it really is.
The actors he likes are Ralph
Fiennes, Lawrence Fishbourne, Michael Cain,
Ben Kingsley, Gene Hackman, Robert de Niro,
Meryl Streep (he LOVES Meryl), Natalie
Portman, Cate Blanchett, Christina Ricci, Toby
Maguire, Mel Gibson (a better Hamlet then
Kenneth Branagh, according to him) and Edmund
Kean (a British 18th century stage actor). If
he were a vampire, he would sire Angelina
Jolie. James also has an immense admiration
for Michael Winters (from Gilmore Girls?),
who he met while reading for a part in the
play Cider House Rules, in Seattle:
Michael Winters is the best actor
I've ever seen. I used to watch him on field
trips from good old Davis High to ACT — [American Conservatory
Theater] — plays in San
Francisco. I could work my whole life and
not be as good an actor as Michael is and he
was starving. He suggested I try Hollywood
if I didn't want to starve, too. I did and
it worked. (The Modesto Bee -
05/14/2000)
His favorite movie is Apocalypse
Now (Francis Ford Coppola), and he also
likes Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick and
Kurosawa.
In music, some of his favorites are
Tom Waits, Beck, Morphine, Bob Marley, Miles
Davis, Nirvana, Lauryn Hill, Marvin Gaye,
Charlie Parker, Johnny Lee Hooker, blink-182,
Macy Gray, Bush, Palace/The Palace Brothers,
Al Green, Bob Dylan, Digable Planets, Benny
Goodman, Billie Holliday, Sex Pistols (he
loves My Way), Elvis Costello,
Morcheeba, Roy Orbison, REM, Lou Reed, Belle
& Sebastian, Catherine Wheel, The
Charlatans, The Cure, Arlo Guthrie, Artie
Shaw, Hank Williams, Norah Jones, Radiohead,
The Smiths, Nick Drake, Roy Orbison, The
Clash, Ramones, Beethoven, jazz and
blues.
James enjoys watching football and
news, loves to sleep and play video games:
Gran Turismo, a hyper-realistic
racing game, Wu Tang: Shaolin Style, and Die
Hard Trilogy for good violence. And I'm
embarrassed to say I'm into Star Wars Jedi
power battles, in which you get to whack
things with your light saber!
His favorite food is a medium rare
steak, and he likes to drink Red Bull.
James used to smoke (he has been on
nicotine patches for years).
JAMES' TALENTS
Before the days of fame, to pay the
bills and put himself through Juilliard, James
waited a lot of tables, managed a restaurant
(into the ground, according to him), pushed a
juice cart in the hospital and was a
telemarketer for Philip Morris.
Besides acting, Marsters sings,
plays the guitar and composes songs — he is in
a band called Ghost of the Robot — and
very much likes writing (plays, for instance).
He co-wrote with Christopher Golden and Ryan
Sook the comic book [Spike & Dru: Paint the
Town Red], in 2001.
He also enjoys painting:
I do some painting. I don't think
I'm very good! I like to paint because it
forces a person to sit down and notice the
world. How light plays on things. You end up
noticing the beautiful things in life. You
end up noticing the reflection of light on
water more. The quality of light of the day.
Whether it's a sharp, harsh, crisp light or
whether it's diffuse light. And all of that.
That's the reason I paint. I don't really
show my paintings, 'cause I'm not really,
really all that good. I'll sing a song for
y'all. But paintings... Ah... We'll wait on
that. I do that more for myself than think
it's worth anyone's time to look at it. (GenCon
2001)
JAMES' YOUTH
About growing up in Modesto, he says
it was great:
It was wide-open, and was
relatively safe. You could ride your bike
outside of town, and play in the orchards,
swim in the canals, and play war in the
ditches.
However, when he reached his teen
years, James became an outcast young boy, who
used to hung out with a group that really
didn't want to fit, or be popular:
It (Modesto) was great
up until I was about fourteen, and then I
wanted to get out as soon as possible,
because I wanted things it couldn't offer. I
wasn't really in sync with my class-mates,
as far as priorities or world views. I had a
good group of friends. We liked to piss
people off. We kind of formed our own group
of people, centered around a rock-n-roll
band, that didn't care if people liked us or
not. (Horror Online - 10/1999)
I knew early on that Modesto and
I weren't going to last. I was too
different. I was the freak. I used to mess
with people's minds. (The Modesto Bee
05/14/2000)
His scar on the left eyebrow he got
after being mugged in New York, when he was
returning home from work (bartending at the
Hard Rock):
I was walking home. And, I had,
like, 70 bucks in my boot and I had a
backpack with like dirty underwear and socks
and, like, a comic book in it. And at that
point, I lived down by the water in
Astoria-Queens, which, if anybody knows, is
really a bad part of town. It looks a
little like the Bronze with, like,
burned-out buildings. I was, like, one block
away from the burned-out buildings. This is
when I... I was living with no glass in my
windows. Yeah, try a New York winter with
newspaper over your windows. But, yeah, so
I'm walking home, and five guys come up, and
one says hello with brass knuckles and says
give me your money. And like an idiot, like,
every time this has ever happened, I say
"you *!" It's like, "Come on let's go, I'm
gonna kick your ass!" and so we tussle, and
then his friends jump on and I'm catching
it, basically, I'm really catching it. So, I
drop my bag, and I split and they go for the
bag and I got away. (Creation Con -
January 2003)
It was when he lived in New York
that James went through his "wild years", as
he told once to Kate O'Hare, from Tribute
Media Services:
I have had my rough years. I'm
better now, but there were years when I
spent a lot more time in emergency rooms and
police stations than I do now.
Do tell us...
Um, well, I was up in Harlem
trying to, um, complete a business
transaction, and a guy pulled a knife on
me...
Was said transaction for
merchandise or, er, personal services?
No, no, no, not personal services.
That's the part of it I really... well,
anyway, like I said, I'm better now. Guy
pulled a knife on me, and I wasn't carrying
anything, so he chased me out of the
stairwell. As I came out of the stairwell, I
saw a 2-by-4 on the ground, and I hit him
full on the head when he came out the door.
Actually, it's kind of a serious story,
because I left him there, and I still, to
this day, don't know how he did. It was in a
very rough section of Upper Harlem, and I'm
not sure if anybody would have helped him.
See, these stories I have are not really fun
fight stories. They're really stuff I'm not
actually that proud of, but, anyway, yes,
much better now. I'm much happier now.
JAMES' DREAMS
Being working on TV in the past few
years, James misses being on-stage. However,
he would go back to theater just in New York,
Chicago or London, and this isn't possible
right now, since he is tied to the West Coast
for the next 10 years, due to family
commitments.
One of his dreams is to produce and
star a new big screen version of William
Shakespeare's Macbeth, his favorite
play/character ever; he even already has a
script for it.
DOG OR CAT PERSON?
Cat person... For many years he had
a cat (which he got when he lived in Bronx) —
14-year-old Zachary died of cancer in 2000 —
who was a very good fighter:
And there are about 20 cats, 12
of who belong to my landlord next door, and
whom my cat Zachary enjoys beating up. He
gave one cat a bloody mouth. This was the
other week, and I'm very proud of him This
cat came from the Bronx. He was the one cat
who refused to go back into the cage at the
ASPCA*. He drew my blood on the first
meeting, and I love him. (AOL chat -
1999)
*[AmericanSociety
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals]
GIRLS
After the divorce, James dated
actress [Liz Stauber] for almost
3 years — he met her when they were doing The
Tempest at the Shakespeare Festival in
Los Angeles, in 1997. He gave her his 1965
Ford Mustang, which he liked to tool around:
Actually, it's not mine, it's my
girlfriend's. I bought it for her
Valentine's Day last year. (Houston
Chronicle - 03/05/2000)
