From Chris Snellgrove
| Published
If you are a Buffy the Vampire Slayer If you’ve ever seen Spike actor James Marsters at a convention, you’ve probably heard something that sounds completely wrong: the actor’s American accent. He became famous for playing an undead British villain in this series, but the English accent he displays throughout the series is a complete fake. It sounded very realistic, and the reason for its authenticity is that Marsters received vocal training from real Englishman Anthony Stewart Head, who was annoyed by Marsters’ first attempts at an English accent.
Giles to the rescue
Head was of course part of it Buffy He was cast from the start and his English accent made him the perfect fit for the titular Slayer. Buffy Summers was a Californian party girl forced into a life of monster hunting, and Heads Giles was her stuffy, stuffy counterpart. Spike wasn’t introduced until the second season and Joss Whedon intended to kill him off quickly, but the character’s popularity ensured that he stayed until the end of that series and even appeared in the show’s final season angel Spin off.
Become one Buffy Mainstay meant that James Marsters I had to use his fake British accent for years, but Anthony Stewart Head didn’t wait that long to help him work on it. After Marsters mispronounced a vulgar bit of English slang, he claimed Head took him aside and told him, “That’s not how we say it.” Fortunately, the criticism came with a very generous offer: “I’ll help you now.”
Taught by force
Marsters complimented this story at Dublin Comic Con and joked that it was his Buffy Coworker “basically taught me by force” about Spike’s English accent. As he recalls, he received a new script in his trailer in the morning and Head came over for lunch to help him write the lines. Apparently Head was as tough on Marsters as Giles ever was Buffy: “We went through the script until he was confident that it (the accent) would no longer embarrass him.”
While Marsters can laugh about it early on Buffy Days he’s the first to admit that Head deserves credit for Spike’s great English accent. “(I owe the accent to) Tony Head,” he said, noting how the Giles actor “saved me.” He pointed out that Spike’s accent was particularly questionable in his first appearances, giving fans an easy way to understand when the vocal boost really kicked in.
To this day, Spike remains a fan favorite Buffy character, and the man behind him is eternally grateful for the accent training he received from Head: “If it wasn’t for him, the accent certainly wouldn’t have been as good,” Marsters said. By the way, if you want to hear more of Marsters’ real accent, you can easily find it in shows like… Outliers (a great and overlooked one MCU Series). Or you could listen to a song or two from Ghost of the Robot, the band whose lead singer is Marsters.
As for us, we are facing the next reissue of Buffy the Vampire Slayerand we’ll pay close attention to Spike’s accent in the first two episodes. It should be fun to watch the accent improve over time, and it’s crazy to think that this is all thanks to Anthony Stewart Head. It’s always great when actors share similarities with their most famous characters, and in Head’s case, it turns out he’s just as effective a teacher off-screen as he ever was on the series that made him famous.
Source: Express
