Do we like James Marsters?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up and he backed his co-stars, but there's one real stain and no verified charity work to add.
Marsters is the bloke who made Spike, the peroxide vampire, one of TV's great bad-boys-gone-soft across Buffy and Angel. He played the role for seven years, and when Amber Benson invited him back for Audible's Slayers in 2023 he jumped at it. His take was that a 14-year gap was plenty for a vampire.
He's also been upfront about how hard the show could be. In 2017 he told Pedestrian that filming a harrowing season six scene was “the hardest day of my professional life”, though he said he was still glad they made it. In December 2025 he repeated to Parade that it was “the darkest professional day of my life”. That reads like an actor who took the weight of the material seriously.
Now the stain. Lyrics to a song Marsters wrote about his co-star Michelle Trachtenberg circulated online for years, and Slate's Inkoo Kang shared them in January 2019. Marsters told a fan audience the song was about her and that she wasn't yet 18 when he wrote it. Syfy Wire's writer argued that its romantic framing of a minor was harmful. He was briefly dropped from a Wizard World Portland reunion, then reinstated after fan outcry, though the article found no known link between the two. We didn't find an apology.
On the harm test, he comes up clean. Searches turned up no campaigning against LGBTQ+ or trans people, no conspiracy theories and no political grievance in his own words. His recent audio work with Benson and her co-writer Chris Golden shows no worrying company either. The honest caveat is that he rarely seems to talk politics, so the record is thin rather than glowing.
We found no court cases against him, and no verified charity work either, so the good stuff here is mostly how he treats co-stars and the way he turns up for the people who made Spike a cult hero. That's decent, not saintly. Where you land comes down to how much weight you give a song from years ago.