By means of Chris Snellgrove
| PUBLISHED
Buffy the Vampire Slayer more than just a popular urban fantasy show. It was a TV series that changed the television landscape with cracking writing even as it made us fall in love with its eclectic characters. Perhaps none of those characters are more appealing than James Marsters’ Spike, who entered the show as a soulless and selfish vampire and ended the series heroically sacrificing himself to save the world. many Buffy Fans hope that Spike is real, and maybe he is … at least, that’s what some fans are saying after a Redditor discovered a perfect Spike lookalike in a Joy Division documentary.
The Real Spike
This story started on r/Buffy (the chief Buffy the Vampire Slayer subreddit), where u/PotentialLanguage685 posted pictures of a very real Spike lookalike. The user is viewing a 2007 documentary Joy Division which focused on the band of the same name and contained several clips from the late ’70s. And the user helpfully took pictures of this Spike doppelganger appearing on screen during a montage highlighting that era in the UK punk scene.
At this point, it is worth emphasizing that this unnamed person is not just an appearance James Marstersthe actor who brought our favorite bad boy vampire to life. Rather, this Buffy The fan noticed how the human Spike looked like himself, making it seem like this vampire may have once existed in the real world. And after he posted the pictures, fans scrambled to point out the irony that this guy didn’t even have to look like Spike…rather, Spike was purposely designed to look like this kind of archetypal punk figure. .
For one thing, Buffy Showrunner Joss Whedon wanted Spike to be based on the real punk scene of late Joy Division documentary so lovingly shot. In a previous interview, Whedon made it clear that he wanted his vampiric creation to be “an English punk rock vampire.” That required a change and some voice training from actual Englishman Anthony Stewart Head, and all that work in a British accent is doubly ironic since Marsters originally auditioned with a thick Louisiana accent more than home to True Blood.
In that Buffy subreddit, many fans are talking about how the unnamed person looks like the fictional Spike and the real-life musical legend Billy Idol. As most fans already know, Spike’s look on the show was intentionally modeled after Idol, so we later got a fun line about how Idol stole his look from Spike rather than another way. But in the real world, Idol’s look was more inspired by groups like the Sex Pistols, which brought things full circle: Joss Whedon wanted Spike to be more like Sid Vicious and Marsters insisted that he will be more like Johnny Rotten.
Unfortunately enough for Buffy fans everywhere, Spike is not real. If he is, half of them will always be in love with him and the other half will scream at him about season 6. But this unknown stranger in a documentary on Joy Division is proof that the different influences from our world that lead to Spike’s creation is all true. In that sense, well…you could say that the real William the Bloody is within us.
