By Christina Radish

James Marsters at the 25th Annual Paley Television Festival held at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, Calif. on March 20, 2008.

Based on the popular Japanese manga created by Akira Toriyama, the 20^th Century Fox fantasy adventure Dragonball: Evolution brings a rich mythology to a cast of rising young stars and veteran acclaimed actors. Justin Chatwin takes on the role of the heroic Goku, a powerful warrior who protects the Earth from an endless stream of rogues bent on dominating the Universe and controlling the mystical objects from which the film takes its name. Emmy Rossum is Bulma, a beautiful woman intent on retrieving the Dragonballs for her own reasons; Jamie Chung is Chi Chi, a young martial artist who captures Goku’s eye; and screen legend Chow Yun-Fat is Roshi, the Master who guides Goku on the young man’s epic quest to save the Earth from the forces of darkness.

MediaBlvd Magazine> How did you first become aware of Dragonball?

James Marsters> I was in Toys R Us with my son, who was 7 years old at the time, which was about six years ago. He picked up a DVD off of the shelf and said, “What do you think about this, Dad?,” and it said, “13 and over.” I looked it over and said, “Tell you what, let’s watch it together and, if it gets too crazy, I might have to pull the DVD out.” The very first scene that we saw was between Piccolo and Goku’s son. In that story, Goku had been killed and the only person that could train his son was Piccolo. He has to get trained because there are these villains that are coming that are going to destroy Earth and he is the only one left on Earth who can help. So, Piccolo is on the cliff meditating, as Piccolo does, and thinking deep thoughts, and the little kid climbs up the cliff and says, “Train me! You’re the only one who can! The Earth is in peril! My dad is dead. There’s no one else.” And, Piccolo looks over and goes, “Get away from me kid! Leave me be!” The kid says, “Train me!,” and Piccolo just looks over and goes, “Okay,” and then he smashes the kid with his fist, down into the granite. He comes around, drop-kicks the kid back up into the air and blood is flying off the kid’s lip, and then he comes back around and drives him like a comet, back into the ground. At that point, I almost ripped the DVD out. I thought, “My son is 7 years old. This is insane! What was I thinking?” And then, this shot comes along of the little kid laying on the ground, and the dust parts and you see that his eye is swollen and he’s bleeding, and he starts laughing at Piccolo, as if to say, “I beat you. You will do as I want. I wanted you to train me, and now you will. Haha.” I looked over at my son and he wasn’t terrorized or frightened, but he was just entranced by the strength of this kid. I thought, “Let’s buy another one of these DVDs and keep watching this.” At this point, I think I’ve seen about 85% of Dragonball, Dragonball Z and GT. I’ve seen everything that I could find.

MediaBlvd> When you work on something that already has a following, how do you strike a balance between being respectful of the material while still being creative as an artist? How much input did you give into the creation of Piccolo in this film?                   

James> You have to be aware of the main themes and the larger things that drive the character because some of the surface things are going to change. I wanted to remain as close to the anime as I possibly could. I wanted to change as little as possible. My fight was just to make my character old, decrepit and ugly. In the anime, Lord Piccolo has a walking stick and a hood, and he’s an old, cowered man. It’s only at the end of the season that he rips off the hood and you can see that he’s all muscular, and he fights Goku, and it’s a big surprise. The only difference is that we don’t do the reveal. We just start him revealed, and you can see that he’s muscular. For me, I kept saying to the make-up people, “Older, uglier, more lines. I don’t want my girlfriend to kiss me when she comes to Durango. I want her to run for the hills.” And, I was also very specific that I wanted to be green. Earlier on, there was some discussion of whether or not I should be green and I told Jim, “Unless Piccolo is green, both of our careers are over.” It’s still the Piccolo that everyone knows, he’s just really angry.

MediaBlvd> What did you like about Lord Piccolo? Is there any upside to him?

James> Oh, very much, yeah. Piccolo is not a nice person. He’s not trying to make friends, but he’ll never let you down because he’s living up to his own code. I always thought he was a really wonderful character because of that. I just took the character and asked, “What would make me so angry that I’d want to destroy every human being on earth?” Everybody has buttons. You can do something to anybody and they’ll get that mad, so what happened to him?

MediaBlvd> How many hours did you end up in make-up?

James> The first time we did the make-up, it took 14 hours and it was nobody’s fault but my own. I kept saying, “Uglier, more lines, more age.” Finally, after 14 hours, the make-up artist just slapped me upside the head and said, “I’m done! Go to set!” That was it. But, then we got Edward French to come in and do the make-up and he got it down to 4 hours. I shut up and let him do his job.

MediaBlvd> Did you do much fight training for this? Does having previous experience make that any easier, or is each experience different?                              

James> This was just a whole other level. When I graduated high school, I thought I was ready for college. And then, you get to college and it’s just a whole, huge universe. I was actually a little bit over-confident as I approached the project and, when I started training at 8711, I thought, “Hey, I can do all of this stuff. I’ve worn make-up. I’ve done wirework. I’ve done a lot of stunts. None of this is going to be too much of a stretch.” Then, I got in with these guys, who have done 300, the Spider-Man movies and the Bourne movies, and most of the really great fight scenes that I’ve seen in the last 10 years, and they introduced me to what the level really was in Hollywood. For the first month, it was just standing in my own sweat, day after day, conditioning. Then, it was practicing on the wire and starting to get the choreography in, when we got to Mexico. And, thank goodness for the conditioning because Mexico was at high elevation and I fainted, on the first day. I was flat on my back.

MediaBlvd> How was it to work with Justin Chatwin?               

James> We were told that we would be doing a lot of our own fights and wirework, so it was really about building trust. You need to know the person. What I found with Justin was a really clear mind. He was very brave and willing to fight through pain. At one point, he broke his toe, which sounds like a small thing, but if you’re doing Kung Fu, a toe break is almost as bad as a groin pull, as far as taking you out of the game, and we didn’t even shut the set down for half a day. He went to a trailer, got taped up, and was right back on the set. I don’t even think he took any Tylenol. They wanted him to take some morphine, but he was just like, “Give me an aspirin. Let’s go!” So, I developed a strong sense of respect for him. A lot of times, when you put actors in large stunts, they’ll just freak out, but he never did. When you’ve got millions riding on you and you’re Goku, you have to keep going. A lot of the time that he’s screaming in the film, it’s because he’s stomping on a broken toe.          

MediaBlvd> Did Justin hurt you at all, during the stunts?

James> Justin can punch. I’ve still got a separated clavicle. Every hit was always to the right chest. He hurt me good.              

MediaBlvd> How did playing Lord Piccolo compare to playing Spike?

James> Piccolo is less tortured than Spike. Piccolo is asexual. Spike was always confident, except for his love life, which mixed him up a little bit. Piccolo just does not have that side to him. He is not male or female. So, he has some of the same colors as the darker aspects of Spike because he enjoys hurting people and being really angry, but just take the sex away.

MediaBlvd> Is it past the time where you would do a series for Spike?

James> I think if we did that we’d have to do some camera tests with lighting because Spike doesn’t age and I have. Or, you could say he’s drinking pig’s blood, so he’s aging slowly. I always thought that one of the cool things about being a vampire is that you’re immortal and, if you take that away, it’s not quite so cool. The good news is that I never got any fill-light. Sarah Michelle Gellar got all the fill-light and I got all the slant shadow light because they wanted me villainous, which was cool. If they put me in that costume and actually gave me some fill-light, it might actually look about the same now. But, we’d have to test that because I don’t want Spike to age.

MediaBlvd> Having played Spike for so long, what did you learn about yourself, as an actor, getting to play so many sides of that character?

James> Buffy really cracked my head open. Ultimately, I grew a lot, but I had to come face-to-face with a lot of my fear and a lot of the fountain of my anger. The truth is that the writers on Buffy were extremely brave. They were writing about the most embarrassing, the stupidest or the scariest thing they’d ever done, or the thing that they were most ashamed of, and then they would put a gossamer of fangs over that and send it out to the world. Everyone on set knew how they were writing it. It was real. They just stripped themselves naked, so to speak, week after week, and gave us their souls. A lot of those things are universal, so to play it, you have to own up to your own weaknesses. Usually, on television, you basically tell the same story, every week. You just dress it up with a different guest star. Whereas on Buffy, we really didn’t have any idea what we were going to be doing the next week. Buffy could be turned into a rat. People could fall in love with each other. Anything could happen, which was actually very scary. After they wanted my character to try to rape Buffy, I realized that there really were no rules. I had to show up anytime, five days a week, 24 hours a day, and do anything that they told me to anyone that they told me to, and wear or not wear whatever they told me to. Suddenly, I felt very, very vulnerable. And, normally, that’s not the case on television because it’s just the same boring thing. You know what’ going to happen. It was a gift not to know what was going to happen, but it was also terrifying. These writers were writing about terrifying things, so we never knew what the next terrifying thing was going to be.

MediaBlvd> Torchwood, on the BBC, is really the first show since Buffy that has taken those same kinds of risks on television. How did you get involved with that show and what was that experience like?

James> The creator of Torchwood, Russell T. Davies, was the creator of the British version of Queer as Folk, so I knew he was a writer of substance and I had already heard what he was doing with Doctor Who, but I was not yet aware of how deeply subversive he was, as an artist. I went on the show once, and it was a fabulous time. And then, a couple months after I shot it, I started to hear that there was a homophobic backlash against the show, at which point, the subversive artist in me went, “Oh, my God, I drew blood? Let’s go back there! Let’s cut deep this time!” At the point that I found out there was a backlash, I became addicted to the idea of getting back on the show. And, I will go back on that show as many times as they’ll let me, specifically because it’s subversive in the same way that Buffy was subversive. There are things that we’re told are true, like you can shop for happiness, that are not true, and an artist has the responsibility to tear away those lies. The show doesn’t make apologies and it doesn’t mind if it freaks you out a little bit

MediaBlvd> How was John Barrowman to work with?

James> He’s great! He’s so like his character. He’s a real natural-born leader. He’s very good at it, and really naughty. He really is Captain Jack.

MediaBlvd> You’ve played villains so many times, but they’ve all been so different from each other. Are there specific things that you look for, when you take on a role like that?

James> It’s just about whether I understand the person. I don’t really think of the world, in terms of there being villains and heroes. There are people that are destroying, for different reasons, and there are people that are creating, for different reasons. Sometimes, you can be a villain one year, and then learn your lesson and be a hero the next year. So, I just have to read the script and say, “What’s bugging this person? What is the thing that they’re afraid of, that’s making them behave in this destructive way?” And, if it makes sense, as a human being, then okay. That’s why I’ve played a lot of different kinds of villains. Everybody has a different reason for wanting to protect themselves, or wanting to attack before they get hit themselves.

MediaBlvd> What was it about Brainiac on Smallville that appealed to you? Did it make it more exciting that you were the first person to play him as a live-action character?

James> Yes. I was interested in the idea of playing a robot who really doesn’t care about people. It’s all about objective. He’s such a complex program that he can fake it, so it became kind of like playing a sociopath who’s pretending to be a nice guy. He can charm everybody and really just try to seduce Clark Kent into becoming evil. It was delicious! I had a secret that none of the other characters knew, and I got to run them around the whole time. It was fabulous!

MediaBlvd> You can tell that you really enjoy playing all of these different villains.

James> Yeah. It’s fun to be mean! I’m sorry, but it takes maturity, self-control and discipline to be a decent person. It’s almost like swimming upstream against your own humanity, or the darker parts of it. It’s great just to release and be mean, like we are in our dreams sometimes.

MediaBlvd> A lot of actors might be hesitant about returning to sci-fi, after having played a character for as long as you played Spike. Was that ever a concern for you, or is it really just all about the character for you?

James> The only thing is that I may not want to play vampires, frankly. But, other than that, no it’s not a concern for me. My first favorite film was Planet of the Apes, and the second one. The ones after those were not so amazing, but the first two were actually interesting. As a kid, I went and read the French novel that the first film was based on, and that was a piece of art. It really became clear to me that there are ways to talk about important things, and you can put a gossamer of fantasy over it, which keeps you from being preachy about it. You can address very important themes directly, and that’s just gold. The jester in a medieval court was called The Fool. No one took him seriously. He tells jokes and juggles. But, he was the only one that could tell the King that he was a fat idiot. As long as it was with a joke, he got away with it. And, I feel like genre is that. We can tell society exactly what’s going on because it’s just a joke.

MediaBlvd> What was it like to take on playing a real-life person, with Buzz Aldrin?

James> I was playing a guy that’s a Triple Ace fighter pilot who shot down MiGs over Korea. There’s a piece on YouTube, called “Buzz Aldrin Punches a Journalist,” and it’s this guy following Buzz, all around the world. He won’t leave him alone, saying, “You never landed on the moon! It’s a big fake! I don’t believe you! You’re a liar! You betrayed us!” And, Buzz just says, “Leave me alone, man. Just leave me alone.” Buzz was like 76 years old and 5'9,” and this guy was 35 and 6'5.” The guy just keeps haranguing him, from about half a foot away from his head. Finally, without warning, Buzz turns around and decks him, just putting him out, like a sack of potatoes. So, my fear is that I’m going to meet Buzz Aldrin someday and he’s going to say, “You didn’t play me right!,” and punch me. He’s fabulous! I think he’s the most interesting of the three that went to the moon on the Apollo 11 mission. They were all amazing people, but Buzz’s story is just fascinating, both for what went on before the launch and what happened to his life after he came back. He’s just incredible. I think he did something more amazing than getting to the moon and back. He saved himself as a human being, and that was probably a harder journey.                                                                         

MediaBlvd> What was the appeal of High Plains Invaders?

James> It’s hard to do a Western because there are certain elements that have to be in there, for the audience to recognize it as a Western. You need the train robber, who feels guilty about it. You need the kindly shop owner. You need the drunken sheriff. There are probably 25 or 30 things, and you have to include some of them, for people to say, “That’s a Western.” The thing with that is that it forces us to make the same movie, over and over again, so Hollywood is always trying to find that little flip that you can do to refresh the genre. And, I was reading this script and it occurred to me that the Sci-Fi Channel found the switch. We dump alien bugs on these people. It is a normal Western and then, suddenly, the bugs drop and now we have the thing that freshens up the genre. So, I said, “That’s a fabulous way to turn the whole thing on its head.”. It’s pretty cool, and the network actually likes it a lot.

MediaBlvd> Actors always say that they’d love to play a villain and do a Western. Since you’ve done both, is there anything that you’re still looking to do?

James> After playing a hero cowboy, and playing Buzz Aldrin, who was a hero in his own right, it is so much easier to play villains. When you’re a hero, you’re running, you’re being chased, you’re sweating and you have fear, self-doubt, recrimination and guilt. When you’re a villain, you have none of that. You are just lurking in the shadows, waiting for the hero to pass by, all huffing and puffing, and then you just wack him with a 2-by-4. It’s much easier to lurk than it is to run.