Part of the appeal of the American Pie movies—in which Hannigan played the surprisingly sexual “Band Camp Girl,” Michelle—was to shed some of Willow’s “good girl–next–door” persona. “There’s the sweet-little-ol’-playing-with-the-band side,” says Alyson. “And then there’s the no-holds-barred–sex side. She’s definitely not shy when it comes to bedroom issues.”
Neither is Hannigan. In an interview with Playboy, Alyson answered a series of probing questions about her sex life with good-natured directness. Among the revelations were that she’s had sex while driving, prefers being on the giving end of oral sex, has never had a one-night stand, and likes porn. “Just give me the porn. I don’t need a plot.”
Ironically, when Buffy first aired, the intense media interest in the show caught her off-guard and admittedly rendered her mute. The first time the cast met en masse with assembled television critics from all over the country in January 1997, Hannigan was so intimidated that she literally only uttered a sentence or two—and that was under duress.
But since then, Alyson’s comfort level and confidence has grown. Now, during interviews or in front of fans at sci-fi conventions and other Buffy-related events, she’s positively outgoing and gregarious, displaying a quick wit and charming personality.
Like co-star Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan has been acting almost as long as she has been talking. Born Allison Lee on March 24, 1974, in Washington, D.C., her parents divorced when she was two. The family moved south to Georgia and, just like Gellar, Alyson started working when she was four years old. “I started out by doing commercials in Atlanta,” says Alyson. “I had always wanted to act and I loved it. But at the same time, I don’t really consider myself ‘an actor’ because it’s not necessarily who I am, it’s just what I do.”
Although she was the only one with acting aspirations in her family, Alyson’s family moved to Los Angeles in 1985 so she could try to break into films and television. Her first break came when she was cast in the 1988 sci-fi spoof, My Stepmother Is an Alien, which starred Dan Ackroyd, Kim Basinger, and Seth Green, who played her boyfriend. In 1990 she appeared on an episode of Roseanne, playing a friend of the eldest daughter, Becky.
From there Alyson was hired on her first series, the short-lived Free Spirit, which ran on ABC from September 1989 to January 1990. The show was an updated takeoff on Nanny and the Professor, in which a widower with three children hires a housekeeper named Winnie—who is actually a witch dispatched by her elders—to help a human family. Alyson played thirteen-year-old Jesse Harper, the lone daughter.
Alyson’s next movie was the TV movie Switched at Birth, based on the real-life story of Kimberly Mays, who was switched at birth with another child, Arlena Twigg, who later died. Alyson played Arlena’s sister Gina, at ages thirteen through sixteen. Bonnie Bedelia played her mother.
As a student at North Hollywood High in California, Hannigan says she was more of a Goth geek than computer whiz like Willow. “I dressed in black and dyed my hair black. I wanted to fit in, and this was the crowd that accepted me,” she says. “My theory on high school was, ‘Get in, get out and hopefully I won’t get hurt.’ Basically, it’s a miserable experience, because you’re a walking hormone in a place that is just so cruel. There were times that were okay, but it’s not the little myth that ‘High school is the best years of your life’—no way.”
According to Alyson, not only were the other kids mean, some were just plain strange. “There was this one guy who went to a dentist and had his teeth sharpened into fangs. It was so insane. I mean, how would you even find a dentist who would do that?”
Alyson graduated in 1992, and a year later made two guest appearances on NBC’s Almost Home, which was a reworked version of The Torkelsons, about a single mom raising her five children. In the episodes, originally aired April 17, 1993, and June 5, 1993, Alyson played a tomboy named Sam.
After appearances on Picket Fences and Touched by an Angel, the last job she had pre-Buffy was the ABC television movie The Stranger Beside Me. In this woman-in-peril thriller, Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, who had just made a splash as the new girl on Beverly Hills 90210, played a recovering rape victim who is swept away by a seemingly perfect guy, played by Eric Close, who is actually a Peeping Tom.
Then came Buffy. Other than the prospect of getting another series, Alyson had another reason to be thrilled about the audition: “Even before I met Joss, Toy Story was my favorite movie. I’m actually slightly obsessed with that film because when I was a kid, I would spend countless hours trying to sneak up on my toys because I knew they had secret lives. I was determined to catch them in the act, but I, uh, never did.”
The casting process was a long, drawn-out affair that tested Hannigan’s nerves. “I auditioned way too many times and finally they couldn’t find anyone else who looked as young and acted as immature, so I got the job,” jokes the still-babyfaced actress.
Although she had worked steadily, Buffy was the first time Alyson has starred in a project that had such high visibility and such intense fan interest. A cybernut in real life, Alyson often communicated with fans over the Internet via posting boards and became the object of many adoring Web sites devoted to all things Alyson. And since her character became involved with another woman, she’s become a gay icon.
“I’ve had a really positive response from the people that I’ve spoken with, and it’s just so rewarding,” she told Kenneth Hubbard of SFX magazine. “And it’s just so nice, and it’s so wonderful to meet people that actually have been affected by it personally. It really makes a difference in their lives. I mean, who can ask for anything more than that?”
But Alyson viewed the relationship between the now-deceased Tara and Willow not so much in terms of being same-sex, but in terms of emotional connection. “I don’t really treat Tara any differently than I treated Oz,” she told slayage.com. “Okay, she has bumps on top and she’s softer to kiss, but it’s not like, ‘Ooh, ah, same sex, oh dear, I’ve got to really work into this!’ It’s not something I ever experienced, but then, I’ve never had to experience bringing back my friends from the dead, either.”
Hannigan says that although she has always loved the environment of television and movie sets, there is something special about working on Buffy. “I love everything about this show, even doing the stunts, although after some of the actions scenes you definitely get bruised up. And the people on Buffy are wonderful. I love them very much and everyone has become like family. And the show itself is a lot of fun to work on.”
When asked to share some of the raucous good times she’s had while working on Buffy, Hannigan is aware some of the hilarity might be lost in the translation. “Most of the stories are of the ‘You had to be there,’ variety. Like the time I ‘pantsed’ Nick. Sarah is the one who told me to do it because she wouldn’t—she chickened out. So I did and accidentally pulled his pants all the way down.
“Another time, I had these really stale animal crackers that I had given to Joss’s assistant, George. He tried to be polite and eat them but they were just so stale. Then Nick comes along and starts eating them and didn’t notice they were stale. I was crying I was laughing so hard.”
But it wasn’t always fun and games. During the first season Alyson had some problems with castmate Julie Benz, who played Darla. “She was very mean to me,” Hannigan said in an interview. “She was, like, the meanest person ever to me. I didn’t like her. That was the first season and I still have that grudge. I was on a brand-new show and so excited, and to have someone be so mean to me, I just wanted to cry. Actually, I think I did.”
Alyson’s first high-profile romance was with Marilyn Manson drummer Ginger Fish, whose real name is Frank Kenny Wilson. But even then there was a connection between her and former Buffy co-star Alexis Denisof, who currently plays Wesley on Angel.
“I had the ‘I will not date actors’ philosophy and so did Alexis at the time,” Alyson explained to slayage.com. “So it was one of those flirta
tious friendships. Then I started dating somebody else, and Alexis didn’t like that. When that wasn’t working out, it was like, ‘Oh, we’re still friends, and we’re going to date now.’”
Hannigan and Denisof have discovered there are advantages of dating a fellow actor. “We understand the difficulties, and not even just as an actor understanding another actor’s difficulties,” says Denisof. “We know the specifics of the two shows because we’ve both been on them. So when Alyson tells me whoever’s bugging her that day, I know who she means, and the same for me.”
Although she’s not yet looking past Buffy, Alyson says she hopes that one day she’ll be established enough to be able to pick and choose the scripts she’d like to work on, rather than audition out of necessity. Other than that, her needs and wants are simple. “You have to go for the good things, like world peace, a cure for everything—and a really cool house.”
James Marsters
Had things gone according to his original plan, James Wesley Marsters would be performing Shakespeare in London’s West End. The Bard-loving actor never dreamed his ticket to fame would be a vampire with a killer wit.
Marsters was born in the northern California town of Greenville but grew up in Modesto, a small city of under 200,000 residents located ninety miles east of San Francisco. Modesto was founded in 1870 when the Central Pacific Railroad chose the barren wind- and sand-swept local to be the end of its line.
The youngest of three children, James came from a religious family—his dad was a minister and his mom is a social worker who once considered becoming a nun. After making his stage debut in a fourth-grade production of Winnie-the-Pooh, playing Eeyore, the mournful donkey, James knew that was what he wanted to do the rest of his life. Unfortunately, it made the rest of his schooling seem unimportant, and his grades were affected accordingly.
“To do well in school, my mother had to convince me that it somehow related to acting, like chemistry and higher math, and that was hard to rationalize,” he told Rupert Laight in Starburst. James was further isolated from the usual school interactions after seriously injuring his leg on a sprinkler head. “My leg slid down my bone like a sock,” he says. He had to undergo skin grafts to repair the damage and was laid up for almost a year.
By the time he reached Davis High School, Marsters admitted in an alloy.com interview, he was “a total outcast and had no interest in being popular. I ran with the group of punk-rock punks. We did not want to be liked; we did not want to fit in. We had a rock-and-roll band and the irony was that we became enormously popular because we just didn’t care. We threw the most enormous parties in the town and sought subtle revenge on all the big kids who abused us in junior high. We made sure they didn’t get any when they came to our parties. Yes, we would crush their self-esteem. I don’t like mean kids.” Thinking back, James admits, “The only thing that kept me out of serious trouble over the years is that, ultimately, I love acting more than anything.”
Hearing his siren song, James headed to New York where he attended the famed Juilliard School, appearing in productions of Twelfth Night and Troilus and Cressida. To support himself, James worked a number of jobs, from waiting tables and telemarketing to working in a hospital and bartending. It was during his stint as a bartender in New York that he was the victim of an attempted mugging, which resulted in the scar on his left eyebrow.
“I worked like ninety hours a week to put myself through Juilliard—so they could tell me I was a horrible, useless actor,” Marsters revealed in an interview on his Web site, jamesmarsters.com. He says he had such a bad experience at the school that it made him leery of all acting teachers. “I would really pity the acting teacher that tried to tell me what to do. They might have a perfectly valid thing, but in my mind, the audience tells me when it’s working, when it’s not working. If you’re lucky and wise enough to surround yourself with people who are competent enough to figure out why it’s not working, then you can fix it. It’s kind of like a car.”
Still pursuing theater, James spent time in Chicago where he made his professional debut in Shakespeare’s The Tempest at the Goodman Theatre, then moved to Seattle in 1990, where he appeared in John Pielmeier’s Voices in the Dark, playing a killer. For the role, he gained thirty-five pounds. “I was two hundred pounds, so I was hulky.”
Marsters told ET Online that finding good theater became increasingly difficult. “It got its legs taken out during the eighties. A friend of mine, a great actor, decided to come to L.A. because he couldn’t get his car fixed. I figured he couldn’t get enough money to keep a new car and was going out to L.A., then I was going out.”
But James knew the bulked-up bruiser look he had adopted for the play might not fly in L.A. “I looked at television and noticed that all the guys have these celery-stalk thighs,” he recalled on his Web site. “So I lost fifty pounds before I ever even came down here. It’s all about molding your body. Really, it’s about keeping your body so that you’re not too big or too small, so you can kind of change quickly. But you never want to do anything that’ll give you a long-term problem, like gaining a lot of fat. I really wouldn’t want to do that, because cellulite doesn’t go away.”
Marsters’s first television role was in 1992 as a bellhop in Northern Exposure. “It was absolutely terrifying. I had five lines, and they were each monosyllabic.” Those hoping to catch a glimpse of James will be hard-pressed since only the back of his head and profile made it into the shot. “Thank God—I couldn’t have handled more. I was absolutely petrified. If I had been made to do more, I might have been scared away from the whole thing. But as it was, it came out well”—well enough that he was hired again the following season to play a minister. “It was weird. My learning curve was pretty steep. That was my second role, and I just kind of banged it out in one take.”
James continued to dabble in theater and music between occasional guest roles. Then, in 1997, he auditioned for the role of Spike. “The casting director asked me to do it in both a Southern accent and in an English one. It’s kind of weird; it’s almost inexplicable when something clicks in you, and you just have an instinct toward a role. I was able to just kind let go and have fun with it, and the usual thoughts of how well I did were just kind of erased. I just had a fun time.”
James got a callback and was asked to read with Juliet Landau. He didn’t realize she had already been cast as Drusilla. “We went in and read for all the producers and Joss, and we just kind leapt straight into it. What was really cool about that is they were looking for a punk, rough-around-the-edges character. I’ve had a lot of rough chapters in my past, but I’ve kinda cleaned up, and so I didn’t come in with anything pierced or anything. They trusted that they had the facilities to create the visual impression, and that the internal reality of the character was most important. That’s pretty rare in Hollywood.”
Marsters went into it assuming it was a temporary job. “I was told very bluntly that I’m not going to be here very long.” He recalls Joss Whedon telling him, “Dude, you’re going to die, you’re cannon fodder.”
James didn’t care. He was thrilled to join the cast and even happier playing an evil character. “I love scary movies. I love being scared and I love scaring people. Most people are into vampires. The vampire myth is more powerful than Frankenstein or the Werewolf or the Mummy. Vampires rock.”
Producers decided to go with an English accent for Spike instead of a Southern drawl. Marsters credits his obsession with Monty Python and a fortuitous theater production with helping him prepare. “I was doing a production of The Tempest at the Shakespeare Festival in L.A., and there was a guy from North London playing one of the roles. So I kinda pulled him aside and asked him for some help.”
After his original story arc in the second season ended, Whedon brought James back for the eighth episode in Season Three. “I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll get one this year, maybe I’ll get one next year.’” Instead Marsters was hired on as a regular for the fourth season, despite Ju
liet Landau’s decision not to return full-time as Drusilla.
“We knew that James was great from day one,” Whedon says. “The only question was, how much of the show would he become?” Whedon decided to explore Spike without Dru.
The only downside to playing Spike full-time was having to peroxide his hair twice a month—although he says adding Sweet ’n Low to the dyeing solution helped alleviate the burning—and maintaining his pallid complexion. So although he lives at the beach, James stocks up on strong sunblock. And being the resident stud-pony, Marsters takes great care to keep in shape. He Rollerblades, does countless stomach crunches, and works out with free weights, but not to bulk up. “I do a lot of repetition with low weights because I want definition. It’s your product; you want to make it ready.”
James also makes a point of keeping his weight down to the point of discomfort. He told Richard Harrington of the Washington Post, “I’ve been after a body type since I got on the show. Playing a vampire for six years, it’s hard to be hungry, but I’m a metaphor for hunger, psychological and sexual. And I noticed that the only vampires to really hit the American consciousness and stay there were almost unhealthily thin, with the one exception of the original, Bela Lugosi.”
After moving to UPN, the theme explored in the Buffy episodes grew noticeably darker, which Marsters found invigorating: “It’s an interesting synergy. It seems that Joss’s crucible of experience, the thing that he draws from, is his adolescence, and Buffy is no longer an adolescent.” James told the Washington Post he believes it was the perfect time for Marti Noxon to take over the day-to-day running of the show. “Marti’s crucible seems to have been in her mid-twenties and it’s just perfect; now we have someone who wants to explore herself with this metaphor. So we get a new head writer and a new network, all of which facilitates exploring Buffy as a young adult.”
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