Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of Joss Whedon’s seminal series Buffy the Vampire Slayer , and doesn’t that just make you feel ancient? As someone who started going by her middle name in high school because it was the name of Juliet Landau’s character on the show, Buffy played a huge part in my formative years and is probably one of a handful of reasons I get to write about television for a living. In honor of this huge milestone , I reached out to actor James Marsters, who played Spike, the bleach-blond, British vampire whose complicated relationship with the Slayer helped pave the way for one of the most hard-to-watch episodes of TV history .