Has Spike made a conscious decision to be a good guy in Angel?
Yeah. The interesting thing about that is, once he makes that decision, he becomes a sucker. We’ll see that coming up. That’s one of the problems with caring and investing yourself in the world, because people can take advantage of that. And I thought that was a really daft thing to come out of the gate with. Right when Spike chooses the good side and thinks “I’m gonna try to be a hero”, he gets used.

Although Spike has a soul and must come to tyerms with the horrific events of his past, he seems far less depressed than Angel was when he had to deal with his past…
It was even alluded to in one of the episodes that Angel spent 120 years contemplating infinite remorse, whereas Spike took two weeks of being depressed in a basement and everything was fine! Structurally we got to explore Angel’s long period of depression in back-story; we didn’t have to take time out of the series to actually talk about that. If we put Spike through the same kind of journey, he’d be out of action for 120 seasons! And so he’s got to get over it pretty quickly.
But what’s interesting is, I’m starting to come to the idea that Spike just might not be as deep as Angel. There’s something beautiful about shallowness in that way. It helps you survive. If you can just slough that guilt off, better power to you! But it really may just mean that Spike

is probably not that smart and he’s probably not that deep. We love him anyway.

Spike started on Buffy as an out-and-out villain, didn’t he?
When he took a vampire kid into sunlight and fried him and laughed about it in his very first episode [School Hard], yeah I knew what the trajectory of the character was at that time – psychopath! [Laughs] But you don’t think of yourself as a bad person, because no real person in life thinks of himself as a villain. Everybody thinks of himself as a hero. So if you’re trying to be villainous, then you’re on the wrong track as an actor.

This is your sixth year playing a vampire. What keeps the role of Spike fresh for you?
The thing about Joss [Whedon, Buffy/Angel creator/executive producer] is he doesn’t write because he enjoys employing what’s tried and true; he doesn’t write vampires because he wants to show a lot of blood sucking. He’s using the vampire mythology as a metaphor to talk about how hard it is to actually try to be a force of good in the world, how many pitfalls there are to that choice, how arrogant a choice it is to begin with, and how easily you’re duped once you decide to care about the world. We live in a world where no one can be bothered to care about anything. And Joss is really swimming directly upstream from that and going, “Here’s someone who does care about stuff and is going to take the hits to try and create

something good in the world.” It’s a morality tale about good and evil.
So it’s not so much about just playing a vampire as it is exploring the person. And that’s much more terrifying and much more exciting, because there are five or six things that you are if you’re a vampire; you’re strong, you’re sexy, you’re thin, you suck people’s blood – even if there were things, they would quickly get exhausted if you concentrated on them. But, really, the vampire thing is a leaping-off point to talk about human experience.

Do you still think of Spike as a vampire?
No! When I think of Spike, I don’t think of vampire right away. I think of punk rocker. I think of someone with a lot of passion and maybe not so much common sense. I think about his vulnerability and how hard he works to mask that – all the things that resonate as a human being.

What’s been the hardest part of playing Spike?
The pressure to look the same as you did seven years ago, like a vampire would, becomes enormous. You just hope the audience likes the acting well enough to forget what you looked like originally!

In the opening episodes of Angel’s fifth season, Spike is a ‘ghost’. As an actor, did you have to do anything differently?
Yes. One of the trademark Spike things is to lean against something as if you just don’t