by Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Buffy the Vampire Slayer It was more than just a popular urban fantasy show. It was a TV series that changed the television landscape with its turbulent writing even as it made us fall in love with its eclectic characters. Perhaps none of these characters are more engaging than Spike James Marsters, who enters the show as a selfish, soulless vampire and ends the series by heroically sacrificing himself to save the world. a lot Buffy Fans hoped Spike was real, and maybe he was… at least, that's what some fans are saying after a Redditor spotted a perfect Spike lookalike in a Joy Division documentary.
The real Spike
This story begins on r/Buffy (President Buffy the Vampire Slayer subreddit), where u/PotentialLanguage685 posted photos of a very real Spike lookalike. The user was watching the 2007 documentary Joy oath which focused on the band of the same name and largely featured clips from the late 1970s. The user helped take photos of the Spike lookalike who appeared on screen during a montage highlighting the UK punk scene of that era.
At this point, it's worth stressing that this unnamed man simply doesn't look like that James Marstersthe actor who brought our favorite bad boy vampire to life. Instead, this Buffy One fan noted how much the man looked like Spike himself, making it seem like this vampire might have existed in the real world. After he posted the photos, fans were quick to point out the irony that this guy doesn't necessarily look like Spike… instead, Spike was intentionally designed to look like this kind of typical punk character.
For one thing, Buffy Showrunner Joss Whedon wanted Spike to be based on the real punk scene that later emerged Joy oath The documentary is very lovingly captured. In a previous interview, Whedon explained that he wanted his vampire creation to be an “English vampire.” This required a radical makeover and some vocal training from actual Englishman Anthony Stuart Head, and all this work on the British accent was doubly ironic because the Marsters originally auditioned with a thick Louisiana accent that would have been more at home in True blood.
On that Buffy On the subreddit, many fans discussed how similar the unnamed man is to the fictional Spike and real-life music legend Billy Idol. As many of these fans already know, Spike's appearance in the show was deliberately modeled after Idol, so much so that we later get a fun line about how Idol stole his look from Spike and not the other way around. But in the real world, Idol's look was more inspired by groups like the Sex Pistols, which brings things full circle: Joss Whedon wanted Spike to be more like Sid Vicious and Marsters insisted he should look like Johnny Rotten.
Unfortunately enough for Buffy Fans everywhere, Spike isn't actually real. If he were, half of them would be constantly lusting after him and the other half would be screaming at him about season six. But this anonymous stranger in the Joy Division documentary is proof that the various influences from our world that led to the creation of Spike were all very real. In that sense, well… you could say the real William Bloody was inside us all along.
