James Marsters Press Archive

source: DeathRay magazine
issue: #18 (£4.99)
published: March, 2009
author: Thom Hutchinson
transcripted by: polarbear (thank you!)

He’s played a punk vampire, a sentient computer, and a homicidal time traveller, but April brings the greatest challenge yet for James Marsters. Bringing Lord Piccolo to the big screen in Dragonball Evolution. He speaks exclusively to DeathRay about going Green and turning Japanese . . . . by Thom Hutchinson

Speaking to James Marsters, you immediately understand why he’s so dear to his fans. Gracious to a fault and displaying what can only be a fellow geek’s understanding when faced with questions such as, ‘How green are you going to be?’ (incidentally, this applies to his Braniac role for Smallville as well as his Lord Piccolo in the upcoming Dragonball Evolution film), the 46 year old is a joy to interview. Right on is his favourite turn of phrase.

It’s been ‘right on’ with Marsters for awhile now. His formative years were spent toiling in regional theatre, first in Chicago and then Seattle, where he co-founded the new Mercury Theatre in homage to his hero Orson Welles. And then he broke into TV with bit parts in Northern Exposure and Andromeda, before receiving mass adulation (skewed female obviously) for his role as Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The English, punky rebel was supposed to be killed off after only a few episodes, but he ended up hanging around for ’97, joining the Scooby Gang , and becoming Buffy’s third major love interest. And then he graduated to Angel, a character to good to lose to TV history.
Now genre has him, and he couldn’t be happier. Smallville deployed Marsters as self-aware computer Braniac, BBC Wales flew him across the Atlantic to be a sadistic/erotic foil for Captain Jack Harkness in Torchwood. Somewhere on SC-FI Later this year, he’ll be fighting giant bugs in a cowboy hat. Marsters has come a long distance since his Shakespeare days, but as he explains, scouring the world for dragonballs as the villainous Lord Piccolo isn’t so far removed from something like Macbeth. Right on.

Death Ray: We Know you’re a bit of a genre geek, but were you an avid viewer of the Dragon Ball anime?

James Marsters: My son is ! I have a 12 year old boy, so for the last five years we’ve been watching the Dragon Ball together and I’ve see 95% of the episodes. There are no bad one . . . .

DR: But there is a hell of alot of plot to compress into a single movie.

JM: There’s five to seven films in there! But we’re counting on making many films. Dragonball Evolution is Goku becoming a man. We took a story where the main hero is seven years old and the bad guys are midgets, and we pumped it up, so it’s more like Dragon Ball Z.

DR: Would it be right to think of the film as a truly globalised blockbuster?

JM: Yes very much. The cartoon is unapologetically bright, unapologetically Asian. The calculation is that the American audience is ready for that. We try to stay true to the tenor of the source material.

DR: So what liberties have you taken with Lord Piccolo?

JM: In the cartoon, Lord Piccolo is this old, wizened man. He looks like he is 95 years old and he’s green. He looks like a wart. He’s got so many wrinkles and he walks with a stick. He’s this crone figure in a big hood. But Piccolo is younger than that in our film, he’s more powerful than that, but he’s still old and in some ways decrepit. His transformation is something we’re going to save until later.

DR: Spike, Braniac, Captain John an now Lord Piccolo – you have a reputation for playing sympathetic monsters . . .

JM: I cut my teeth in regional theatre, which means we did a lot of Shakespeare because you didn’t have to pay any rights. And I’m very happy that I sis. IN Shakespeare there are not good and band guys. There are just people who are in conflict or who are making mistakes. That is reflected very much in Dragonball and Dragon Ball Z.

DR: What about Piccolo? You could have chosen to play him as irredeemably evil . .

JM: I don’t think he is evil at all! He has a very good reason for being angry. He was a victim of this binding spell. He was in a place where he couldn’t breathe, his molecules couldn’t move and a though would take a thousand years to come to the outside of his consciousness . . . simply for being in disagreement with the mystics., They rob him of his youth. When he finally bursts out of prison, he’s an old man and he’s mad! And so he has to find the dragonballs.

DR You’ve been filming in Mexico, but there is, of course, a Japanese influence everywhere. What kind of world is this?

JM: It’s just like the cartoon. It’s in the near future. It’s a multi national world where ethnicity is not really addressed. IN the cartoon they had a dog as president of the world! It’s the weirdest thing. So we’ve cast it from all over the world without an eye towards ethnicity.

DR: Dragon Ball has this image of being deeply silly, but is there something more serious going on?

JM: When I think of Goku, he’s a quintessential man. He’s humble, he’s meek,. And he doesn’t go around thrusting his chest out, he doesn’t try to dominate other people. Give the choice, he’ll be out mowing the lawn and playing with his children. But God help you if you threaten his family or his town or his world. That’s a really good template for manhood, which is to say, I think men are peacekeepers – but they’ll enforce peace with radical violence if necessary. But what they are looking for is peaceful. Dragon Ball’s populated with a lot of real men, as well as overgrown boys. Goku’s the most peaceful, goofiest, nicest, meekest guy you’ve ever met in your life, because he doesn’t have to prove anything. That’s the message I’m excited to give to young boys . . .

DR: How have you translated Dragon Ball’s kinetic, cartoon action to the big screen?

JM: Quicker cuts and a sense of raw power. Subtlety’s out of the window! I think the US audience is toned for it. Film has been following anime for long enough, after all; this kind of visual language is in the Matrix movies.

DR: What was your experience of working with director James Wong?

JM: Fabulous man. We went to Durango and there was a six week hurricane, and it was called Dragonball Evolution. There are so many elements, I just thought, ‘how is anything getting done?’ And there was this Buddha-guru guy names Jim Wong in the middle of it. You can throw mountains at that guy! He’s unstoppable; so strong, so calm and so sure. When you are in the middle of one of these films it really is like a war. To have a rock steady hand like that is crucial. Maybe it was all an act? He’s a very calm man, but yea, I guess there is a little bit of chaos behind him.

DR: You saw Dragonball Evolution for the first time a couple of days ago. Was it the film that you thought it would be?

JM: they say there’s the film that’s written, the film that’s shot and the film that’s edited. And if it’s not an improvement on the script then you shouldn’t be paid. I think we did that. I wouldn’t say we had conflict, but we had good artistic back-and-forth, and I ultimately did what I was told. A lot of people have seen Dragonball now and have loved it. Everyone from the grips to the makeup department.

DR: Are you expecting your son to be your harshest critic or most devoted fan?

JM: The problem is, my son has discovered Jimi Hendrix. I wonder if he’s going to be interested anymore? He’s not too old for it, but he’s into playing guitar right now. I’ll get him to the premiere and remind him how fun it is.

DR: You’ve been a part of several major genre franchises now. What keeps bringing you back?

JM: They give me better toys, y’know? I was playing a cop for Jerry Bruckheimer on Without a Trace thinking, ‘This is a nice job’. You sit in a cop car and you sip coffee and you talk to your cop friend. And then you talk to someone on the sidewalk, sit in court all day, and it’s very easy. But I’m always waiting for a demon to come and rip someone’s head off!” So I leap at it, because I can go places where I’m not able to go at other times. I just played a cowboy for Sci-Fi actually, and big bugs attack! And I play Buzz Aldrin in Moonshot, which I wouldn’t say is a pedestrian role, but it was real. I’ve seen 20 minutes of it and I think I’m going to be very proud.

DR: How does filming in sunny California compare with Shooting British TV in Wales?

JM: Exactly the same. Don’t mess with the boss, show up on time, know your lines, try to have fun. I would even say that structurally British Television is better written. There’s usually two plots worth of US TV in every hour of British drama. But ironically, I think British TV is still learning how to calm down. You guys have the best actors in the world, but sometimes in editing and storytelling it’s a little too pumped up. That’s going to be corrected in the next ten years.

DR: Why ‘pumped up’?

JM: It has to do with you guys being so good at stage acting. There’s not much you learn on stage that’s applicable to film acting. It takes a long time to let go of those tools. And it takes a long time to stop telling the story. It’s drilled into us stage actors to ‘tell the story’. That’s death for film. You cannot concern yourself with the story.

DR: We can imagine this being a problem on Torchwood: you and John Barrowman each bring out the theatre in the other.

JM: John and I are on exactly the same page man! I remember when we were shooting in some turd-filled pasture in Wales. It’s five in the morning and we’re all freezing to death. If we let ourselves, we could get really miserable. But John and I are not going to allow that to happen. The worse it gets, the more outrageous he becomes. There’s the younger actor there playing John’s brother and he’s looking around as if he’s afraid he’ll catch a disease. He was a really good guy, so I said, ‘After this is over dude, I bet you’re going to run back to the stage and never look back.; He looked at me and said, ‘How did you know?’ From a stage perspective, we were just animals! You have to know you lines and you character, but on the day, once they say action, it’s all about having fun. John realises that in his bones.

Dragonball Evolution is out in UK cinemas from 3 April, and Moonshot is due for broadcast in July. And if you want to catch James Marsters on tour with his band, then there’s a gig booked at the Union Chapel in London on 1 May.