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According to Chris Snellgrove
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Buffy the Vampire Slayer was more than a popular urban fantasy show. It was a TV series that transformed the television landscape with its explosive writing, even as we fell in love with its eclectic characters. Perhaps none of these characters were more compelling than James Marsters’ Spike, who enters the show as a soulless and selfish vampire and ends the series heroically sacrificing himself to save the world. Many Buffy Fans wished Spike was real, and maybe he was… at least that’s what some fans are saying after a Redditor discovered the perfect Spike in a Joy Division documentary.
The real Spike
This story starts on r/Buffy (Chief Buffy the Vampire Slayer subreddit) where u/PotentialLanguage685 posted pictures of an all-too-real Spike lookalike. The user watched a documentary from 2007 Joy Division which focused on the band of the same name and features clips from the late 70s in abundance. And the user helpfully took pictures of this Spike doppelganger appearing on screen during a montage highlighting the British punk scene of the time.
It is worth pointing out at this point that this unnamed man is simply not what he looks like James Marstersthe actor who brought our favorite bad boy vampire to life. This instead Buffy a fan noticed how much the man looked like Spike himself, making it appear that this vampire may have once existed in the real world. And after he posted the pictures, fans tried to point out the irony that this man didn’t necessarily look like Spike… instead, Spike was deliberately designed to look like this type of archetypal punk character.
for one thing Buffy showrunner Joss Whedon wanted Spike to be based on the actual punk scene Joy Division a document so lovingly captured. In a previous interview, Whedon clarified that he wanted his vampire creation to be an “English punk rock vampire”. This required a makeover and some voice training from the real-life Englishman Anthony Stewart Head, and all that British accent work was doubly ironic because Marsters originally tried with a thick Louisiana accent that would have been more at home. True blood.
On that Buffy subreddit, many fans discussed how much the unnamed man resembled both the fictional Spike and the real-life music legend Billy Idol. As many of those fans already knew, Spike’s look on the show was deliberately modeled after Idol, so much so that we later got a funny 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 that he should be more like Johnny Rotten.
Unfortunately enough for Buffy fans everywhere, Spike isn’t actually real. If he was, half of them would be lusting after him all the time and the other half would be screaming at him about season 6. But this unknown stranger in the Joy Division documentary is proof that the various influences from our world that led to Spike’s creation were all too much actually. In that sense, well… you could say that the real William the Bloody has been inside of us all along.
