Buffy Star Hated Their Costar’s Accent And Made Them Fix It

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 15 seconds ago

If you’re a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan who has ever seen Spike actor James Marsters at a convention, you’ve probably heard something that sounds downright wrong: the actor’s American accent. He became famous by playing an undead British bad boy on that show, but the English accent he sports throughout the series is a complete fake. It sounded very realistic, and the reason for its authenticity is that Marsters got voice training by actual Englishman Anthony Stewart Head, who was annoyed by Marsters’ earliest attempts at an English accent.

Giles To The Rescue

Head, of course, was part of the Buffy cast from the very beginning, and his English accent made him the perfect foil for the titular Slayer. Buffy Summers was a California party girl forced into a life of monster hunting, and Head’s Giles was her staid and stuffy opposite number. Spike wasn’t introduced until season 2 and Joss Whedon planned to quickly kill him, but the character’s popularity ensured that he stuck around through the end of this show and even popped up in the final season of the Angel spinoff. 

Becoming a Buffy mainstay meant that James Marsters was going to have 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 claims that Head took him aside and told him, “We don’t say it like that.” Fortunately, the critique was paired with a very generous offer: “I’m going to help you now.”

Tutored By Force

Regaling this story at Dublin Comic Con, Marsters joked that his Buffy colleague “basically tutored me by force” regarding Spike’s English accent. As he recalls, he would get a new script in his trailer in the morning and Head would come over at lunch to help him run lines. Apparently, Head was as strict with Marsters as Giles ever was with Buffy: “we would go over the script until he was satisfied that it [the accent] wasn’t going to embarrass him anymore.”

While Marsters can’t help but laugh about those early Buffy days, he is the first to admit that Head deserves credit for Spike’s awesome 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 is particularly iffy in his first couple of appearances, giving fans an easy way to understand when the voice tutoring 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 hadn’t been for him, it wouldn’t have been as good of an accent for sure,” Marsters said. Incidentally, if you want to hear more of Marsters’ real accent, it’s easy to catch in shows like Runaways (a great and overlooked MCU series). Or you could listen to a song or two from Ghost of the Robot, the band for which Marsters is the lead singer.

As for us, we’re coming up on our next rewatch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and we’re going to pay very close attention to Spike’s accent in those first two episodes. It should be fun to note all the ways that the accent gets better over time, and it’s wild to think that this is all thanks to Anthony Stewart Head. It’s always awesome when actors share some similarities with their most famous characters, and in Head’s case, it turns out he is just as much of an effective teacher offscreen as he ever was on the show that made him famous.

Source: Express