I am such a giddy fangirl.
Aug. 31st, 2005 07:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowscastOkay, so here's my report on seeing James Marsters in Toronto.
Of the three levels of tickets, I bought the cheapest: the "silver." For $80 Canadian this entitled me to the Sunday 1-hour Q&A session, one autograph, and one pre-autographed photo.
I showed up at the Convention Centre as early as possible on the 28th, given that Toronto's subway doesn't start running until 9 a.m. on Sundays (and what the hell's with that?). I exchanged my Ticketmaster ticket for a pass, found the room where the Q&A would eventually be ... and realized I was really far too shy to start walking up to random people with passes matching mine and ask them if they happened to be into slash. Errr. So I went to a park across the street, read my book for a while, then at 11 a.m. realized it was noon in the time zone I'd been in the previous day, and I was hungry. I went to the East Side Mario's next to the Convention Centre, ate lunch alone, then headed back in. At that point it was still an hour and a half before the Q&A was supposed to start. A woman in the washroom noticed my pass and told me that people were lining up for the event in a big empty room upstairs. I'm very grateful to her for this info!
The room was a good waiting place; there were enough chairs that everyone waiting in line could have one at their place. Two lines: one for the silver passes, one for the VIPs. I scanned the VIP line to see if I could spot![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sp23, hoping to recognise her from the photo she'd posted online a few days previously, but no luck there. The vast, vast majority of people present were chicks, by the way, which surprised me not at all. Anyway, I chatted with the people ahead of me and behind me in line. Sadly, none of them were LJ-fen, but they did all have more con-going experience than me, so they told me some stories. Apparently, if I ever want to properly go to a SF con I should consider Toronto Trek; they all said it's quite good. The people ahead of me showed me their S7 DVD case of English origin (different from the boxes here), on which they're getting actors to autograph the episode descriptions of whatever was the last episode they'd appear in. The woman who played Halfrek had already autographed "Selfless" for them. I thought that was a rather neat idea.
Then, finally, it was time to go downstairs to Theatre One. I got a pretty good seat, middle-ish, near one of the support poles but not obstructed by it. While we waited for James to come in, a woman sitting ahead of me showed the woman sitting beside me (and, by extension, me) a collection of photos she'd taken over the course of the con: her Spike and Angel dolls (::ahem:: action figures?) partaking in all the weekend's activities. Spike and Angel drank from giant Tim Horton's cups, ate giant salad, drank giant beers, and looked perfectly natural standing outside the convention centre itself (thanks to the magic of 2-D photography). There was even one of doll-Spike standing onstage with James Marsters! They were awesome.
When a cheer rippled through the room, I knew something was happening. A man came onstage and made some kind of lame joke about being there in place of James, and then gave us a little speech about video- or audio-taping being forbidden (though flash photography was okay, yay!). I guess he was James's manager or an employee of the con or something ... I don't know how these things work.
Anyway ... then there was really enthusiastic cheering, and James came onstage!
There was some fumbling with something I couldn't quite see (I think they managed to break the table, or something?) and then the other guy went away and James was standing onstage with a mike. He said something about the guy who had just gone, and added "Don't fuck with [guy's name]." [pause] "I fucked with him once." [crowd giggles, claps, cheers] "Took me weeks to recover." [crowd collectively shrieks with delighted joy] Now, you can't tell me that James didn't know exactly what he was implying with that last bit. Anyway, he looked around with a really bemused sort of grin, and said "You want me to be gay, don't you? I don't see why ... isn't it better for you if I'm not? I do kiss fans sometimes ..."
::dying of combined amusement and lust just remembering it:: That man is even more of a flirt/tease than Spike is.
I should stick in a disclaimer here, that nothing in quotation marks is a direct quote, it's all just depending on my shoddy memory—but I think I got that first bit pretty close to verbatim.
So, anyway. James is hot. Dear god. His hair is still his natural dark-blond colour, short but not buzz-cut-short. He was wearing a tight black t-shirt (we're definitely talking visible ab ripples) and loose-ish faded blue jeans with a few rips in them.
::fans self::
You know how onscreen, Spike pretty much flirts constantly with whoever's around him? Yeah, James was doing that. With the whole audience.
He was so cute! He had a wonderful sort of bouncy energy, and his voice is damn sexy even without the British accent.
Um, okay. There was about an hour's worth of Q&A and I don't remember everything, obviously, but here are a few snippets as best as I can recall them:
In response to some question about anything he'd done that had made him uncomfortable, he mentioned the nude scenes with Sarah. Apparently she and the crew would tease him. I think I'd read about this stuff before, but it's way more intense to hear him talking about it in person; I definitely got poor woobie, I want to snuggle him and make it all better feelings. (Um, I guess it's inevitable that some of my Spike issues would bleed over, right?)
On a related note, someone asked what scene he'd had the most trouble getting through, and he mentioned one in S7 where he had to lick Sarah. I don't remember that scene, but I'll probably have trouble not giggling when I spot it.
One young woman asked him to play a chord on her guitar. He agreed, and she ran up onstage with the instrument. He played several bars of some song—not one I recognised and he wasn't miked at that point, so I didn't really get the full effect, but still. Jame sang. ::squee::
Some guy (yes, there were guys!) asked him what it had been like to work with Joss. James said he didn't feel like he ever really had worked with Joss. Apparently in any episode that Joss wrote/directed himself, Spike would get, like, two minutes of screen time. (I hadn't noticed this myself, as I'm terrible about not paying attention to who wrote or directed particular episodes.) Anyway, James told us that when the end of the series was coming up, Joss told him that Spike was going to save the world through some selfless act. "Woohoo," James thought, "I'm finally going to get to really work with Joss!" And then Spike saved the world through a selfless act in two minutes.
James grins wryly. Audience laughs sympathetically.
Um, let's see. Someone asked him something about acting, I don't remember what, but James ended up talking about how camera operators hate him because he's always moving around so much. It was really interesting to see him breaking down Spike's persona into its physicality like that. He mentioned that he always felt a bit uncomfortable on the Angel S5 sets because they were lit purely through reflected light, which is apparently awesome, but also means there's a really narrow range of focus for the cameras so if James missed his mark by, like, two inches the shot would be toast. That's pretty much all technobabble to me, but it's interesting to wonder if the sense I had of Spike's discomfort at Wolfram & Hart was actually partly due to that.
Oh, another question about acting led to the most serious/dark/intense moment of the day. Someone who's apparently studying acting herself asked him if he'd ever felt discouraged, like giving up. And then he told us that back when he was in Juilliard, some of his teachers had told him he was terrible at acting, and he should give up before he got old and bitter. This apparently affected him pretty deeply. He said there'd been a moment when he'd seriously considered throwing himself off the school's roof.
And then he talked about how in the end, the audience cuts through all the bullshit—they won't let you go on thinking you're good if you're not, and they won't let you go on thinking you aren't if you are.
I think we've let him know that he is.
Umm. Moving on. Someone asked him what was the worst thing a fan had ever done to him. He said there was one appearance in England, back when he was pretty new to this whole thing and didn't have a really good sense of boundaries yet, when a little old English granny had come up to him and asked him to turn around. He thought it was sort of odd, but ... sweet little old lady, right? So he did. And then [picture James relating this in a little old English granny voice], she told him to bend over. So he did. And then she stuck her hand in his ass and told him to "clench."
Oh my. Oh my. We laughed and cringed along with him.
Watch out for those little old English ladies, eh?
Someone asked him stuff about his Smallville role, and I've never seen an episode of Smallville in my life so I don't remember very well what all he talked about in relation to that, but I do remember that he talked a lot about the intense relationship between his character and Lex, so I guess it should be pretty slashy. *g*
Someone stood up and thanked James for something he'd said in a previous appearance—something about race, I think, something about the improbable whiteness of Sunnydale. Then James talked a bit about how he thinks it makes sense to cast roles according to who's the best actor, and not along racial or even gender lines; just because a role was written for a white male doesn't mean it can't be played by anyone else. He mentioned something about his own company, which I didn't have enough background info to really follow. Is he a producer, too?
Anyway, I think one of the last questions he was asked was, would he ever play Spike again if he had the chance? And he said that he would love to. He also said, though, that there's only maybe three more years of grace left before he gets too old. And because I've encountered mysteriousness online before about both Spike's and James's ages, I was interested that he was totally direct here: he said that he was 35 when he first started playing Spike, but Spike read as 27, and now he's 43 and he thinks he can manage to look the way Spike's supposed to look for maybe two or three more years.
Mmmm, Spike.
Anyway, he said that no one had yet approached him seriously about any further Buffyverse projects; people would occasionally come to him, but all couched in highly theoretical terms: "We're not actually thinking of doing anything else, but if we were, would you be interested?..."
So, yeah, don't hold your breath.
Anyway, it ended all too soon. And then we all went downstairs to line up for the autograph-signing. This meant, of course, another giant line. In fact, I was in line for about three hours for the autograph. It was fine, though, because a RL friend of mine who'd been up at the comics part of the con came down to hang out with me for most of the time I was in line. Visiting her was one of my main non-James-related goals for the trip to Toronto, so that was perfect. When she left to meet her other friends, I struck up a conversation with the two women standing behind me in line. Once again I went fishing for fellow fanfic people and got an empty hook (these two at least mentioned having read some LJ stuff, but said they didn't have journals themselves and quickly changed the subject, so if they were indeed slashers they were too deeply closeted to do me any good!) Anyway, one of them very nicely took my picture with James with my camera while I was getting his autograph.
Unlike all the people who brought cool things for James to sign, I didn't even realize an autograph was included in the pass I'd bought. So in the end I just got him to sign a blank page in the little notebook I carry around in my purse. This is the notebook where I write everything from ideas for fanfic to directions to my friends' houses. Ultimately, I think it's really neat to have James's signature in it.
Anyway, I'll probably tear out the page and frame it or something. *g*
The particular appeal of the signing, of course, is it gives the fan a moment or two to interact personally with the object of her fannishness. So here is my whole interaction with James Marsters:
[James shakes my hand]
Me: "I really enjoyed your character Spike."
James: "I had a ton of fun playing him."
Me: "I think I must've had just as much fun watching him!"
James: "Thanks!" [He shakes my hand again; I take my notebook and go.]
Yeah. Afterwards, I was so thrilled I was actually shaking a little. Dear god, when did I turn into such a fangirl?
Seriously, though, it's all in good fun.
I was totally impressed with James's ability to smile at me and talk with me and make me feel like I was important to him, considering he'd been doing the same thing for an unending stream of fans for three hours at that point, with more to come. But then, maybe it's not so hard to be thrilled to meet people who are thrilled to meet you. It must be something of a rush on the other end, too, right?
Anyway, that's the end of the story. I picked up my pre-autographed photo (which is now perched by the side of my bed) and went upstairs to meet my friend from the comic con for dinner.
I guess my only regret is that I didn't manage, in the end, to make contact with anyone from LJ-land. But that disappointment was overshadowed by the coolness of actually meeting a fellow slasher, not at the con itself, but in the house where I was staying! I was staying at a friend's place, but my friend himself was out of town, so I ended up just hanging out with his roommate (who I'd previously met only very briefly). And it turns out that she actually reads and writes fanfic! Including slash! We ended up hanging out on the porch until the wee hours, totally bonding. Awesomeness.
Okay, I'm going to post this, and then try to get the pictures off my camera. When I can get that to work I'll post them, too.
Of the three levels of tickets, I bought the cheapest: the "silver." For $80 Canadian this entitled me to the Sunday 1-hour Q&A session, one autograph, and one pre-autographed photo.
I showed up at the Convention Centre as early as possible on the 28th, given that Toronto's subway doesn't start running until 9 a.m. on Sundays (and what the hell's with that?). I exchanged my Ticketmaster ticket for a pass, found the room where the Q&A would eventually be ... and realized I was really far too shy to start walking up to random people with passes matching mine and ask them if they happened to be into slash. Errr. So I went to a park across the street, read my book for a while, then at 11 a.m. realized it was noon in the time zone I'd been in the previous day, and I was hungry. I went to the East Side Mario's next to the Convention Centre, ate lunch alone, then headed back in. At that point it was still an hour and a half before the Q&A was supposed to start. A woman in the washroom noticed my pass and told me that people were lining up for the event in a big empty room upstairs. I'm very grateful to her for this info!
The room was a good waiting place; there were enough chairs that everyone waiting in line could have one at their place. Two lines: one for the silver passes, one for the VIPs. I scanned the VIP line to see if I could spot
sp23, hoping to recognise her from the photo she'd posted online a few days previously, but no luck there. The vast, vast majority of people present were chicks, by the way, which surprised me not at all. Anyway, I chatted with the people ahead of me and behind me in line. Sadly, none of them were LJ-fen, but they did all have more con-going experience than me, so they told me some stories. Apparently, if I ever want to properly go to a SF con I should consider Toronto Trek; they all said it's quite good. The people ahead of me showed me their S7 DVD case of English origin (different from the boxes here), on which they're getting actors to autograph the episode descriptions of whatever was the last episode they'd appear in. The woman who played Halfrek had already autographed "Selfless" for them. I thought that was a rather neat idea.Then, finally, it was time to go downstairs to Theatre One. I got a pretty good seat, middle-ish, near one of the support poles but not obstructed by it. While we waited for James to come in, a woman sitting ahead of me showed the woman sitting beside me (and, by extension, me) a collection of photos she'd taken over the course of the con: her Spike and Angel dolls (::ahem:: action figures?) partaking in all the weekend's activities. Spike and Angel drank from giant Tim Horton's cups, ate giant salad, drank giant beers, and looked perfectly natural standing outside the convention centre itself (thanks to the magic of 2-D photography). There was even one of doll-Spike standing onstage with James Marsters! They were awesome.
When a cheer rippled through the room, I knew something was happening. A man came onstage and made some kind of lame joke about being there in place of James, and then gave us a little speech about video- or audio-taping being forbidden (though flash photography was okay, yay!). I guess he was James's manager or an employee of the con or something ... I don't know how these things work.
Anyway ... then there was really enthusiastic cheering, and James came onstage!
There was some fumbling with something I couldn't quite see (I think they managed to break the table, or something?) and then the other guy went away and James was standing onstage with a mike. He said something about the guy who had just gone, and added "Don't fuck with [guy's name]." [pause] "I fucked with him once." [crowd giggles, claps, cheers] "Took me weeks to recover." [crowd collectively shrieks with delighted joy] Now, you can't tell me that James didn't know exactly what he was implying with that last bit. Anyway, he looked around with a really bemused sort of grin, and said "You want me to be gay, don't you? I don't see why ... isn't it better for you if I'm not? I do kiss fans sometimes ..."
::dying of combined amusement and lust just remembering it:: That man is even more of a flirt/tease than Spike is.
I should stick in a disclaimer here, that nothing in quotation marks is a direct quote, it's all just depending on my shoddy memory—but I think I got that first bit pretty close to verbatim.
So, anyway. James is hot. Dear god. His hair is still his natural dark-blond colour, short but not buzz-cut-short. He was wearing a tight black t-shirt (we're definitely talking visible ab ripples) and loose-ish faded blue jeans with a few rips in them.
::fans self::
You know how onscreen, Spike pretty much flirts constantly with whoever's around him? Yeah, James was doing that. With the whole audience.
He was so cute! He had a wonderful sort of bouncy energy, and his voice is damn sexy even without the British accent.
Um, okay. There was about an hour's worth of Q&A and I don't remember everything, obviously, but here are a few snippets as best as I can recall them:
In response to some question about anything he'd done that had made him uncomfortable, he mentioned the nude scenes with Sarah. Apparently she and the crew would tease him. I think I'd read about this stuff before, but it's way more intense to hear him talking about it in person; I definitely got poor woobie, I want to snuggle him and make it all better feelings. (Um, I guess it's inevitable that some of my Spike issues would bleed over, right?)
On a related note, someone asked what scene he'd had the most trouble getting through, and he mentioned one in S7 where he had to lick Sarah. I don't remember that scene, but I'll probably have trouble not giggling when I spot it.
One young woman asked him to play a chord on her guitar. He agreed, and she ran up onstage with the instrument. He played several bars of some song—not one I recognised and he wasn't miked at that point, so I didn't really get the full effect, but still. Jame sang. ::squee::
Some guy (yes, there were guys!) asked him what it had been like to work with Joss. James said he didn't feel like he ever really had worked with Joss. Apparently in any episode that Joss wrote/directed himself, Spike would get, like, two minutes of screen time. (I hadn't noticed this myself, as I'm terrible about not paying attention to who wrote or directed particular episodes.) Anyway, James told us that when the end of the series was coming up, Joss told him that Spike was going to save the world through some selfless act. "Woohoo," James thought, "I'm finally going to get to really work with Joss!" And then Spike saved the world through a selfless act in two minutes.
James grins wryly. Audience laughs sympathetically.
Um, let's see. Someone asked him something about acting, I don't remember what, but James ended up talking about how camera operators hate him because he's always moving around so much. It was really interesting to see him breaking down Spike's persona into its physicality like that. He mentioned that he always felt a bit uncomfortable on the Angel S5 sets because they were lit purely through reflected light, which is apparently awesome, but also means there's a really narrow range of focus for the cameras so if James missed his mark by, like, two inches the shot would be toast. That's pretty much all technobabble to me, but it's interesting to wonder if the sense I had of Spike's discomfort at Wolfram & Hart was actually partly due to that.
Oh, another question about acting led to the most serious/dark/intense moment of the day. Someone who's apparently studying acting herself asked him if he'd ever felt discouraged, like giving up. And then he told us that back when he was in Juilliard, some of his teachers had told him he was terrible at acting, and he should give up before he got old and bitter. This apparently affected him pretty deeply. He said there'd been a moment when he'd seriously considered throwing himself off the school's roof.
And then he talked about how in the end, the audience cuts through all the bullshit—they won't let you go on thinking you're good if you're not, and they won't let you go on thinking you aren't if you are.
I think we've let him know that he is.
Umm. Moving on. Someone asked him what was the worst thing a fan had ever done to him. He said there was one appearance in England, back when he was pretty new to this whole thing and didn't have a really good sense of boundaries yet, when a little old English granny had come up to him and asked him to turn around. He thought it was sort of odd, but ... sweet little old lady, right? So he did. And then [picture James relating this in a little old English granny voice], she told him to bend over. So he did. And then she stuck her hand in his ass and told him to "clench."
Oh my. Oh my. We laughed and cringed along with him.
Watch out for those little old English ladies, eh?
Someone asked him stuff about his Smallville role, and I've never seen an episode of Smallville in my life so I don't remember very well what all he talked about in relation to that, but I do remember that he talked a lot about the intense relationship between his character and Lex, so I guess it should be pretty slashy. *g*
Someone stood up and thanked James for something he'd said in a previous appearance—something about race, I think, something about the improbable whiteness of Sunnydale. Then James talked a bit about how he thinks it makes sense to cast roles according to who's the best actor, and not along racial or even gender lines; just because a role was written for a white male doesn't mean it can't be played by anyone else. He mentioned something about his own company, which I didn't have enough background info to really follow. Is he a producer, too?
Anyway, I think one of the last questions he was asked was, would he ever play Spike again if he had the chance? And he said that he would love to. He also said, though, that there's only maybe three more years of grace left before he gets too old. And because I've encountered mysteriousness online before about both Spike's and James's ages, I was interested that he was totally direct here: he said that he was 35 when he first started playing Spike, but Spike read as 27, and now he's 43 and he thinks he can manage to look the way Spike's supposed to look for maybe two or three more years.
Mmmm, Spike.
Anyway, he said that no one had yet approached him seriously about any further Buffyverse projects; people would occasionally come to him, but all couched in highly theoretical terms: "We're not actually thinking of doing anything else, but if we were, would you be interested?..."
So, yeah, don't hold your breath.
Anyway, it ended all too soon. And then we all went downstairs to line up for the autograph-signing. This meant, of course, another giant line. In fact, I was in line for about three hours for the autograph. It was fine, though, because a RL friend of mine who'd been up at the comics part of the con came down to hang out with me for most of the time I was in line. Visiting her was one of my main non-James-related goals for the trip to Toronto, so that was perfect. When she left to meet her other friends, I struck up a conversation with the two women standing behind me in line. Once again I went fishing for fellow fanfic people and got an empty hook (these two at least mentioned having read some LJ stuff, but said they didn't have journals themselves and quickly changed the subject, so if they were indeed slashers they were too deeply closeted to do me any good!) Anyway, one of them very nicely took my picture with James with my camera while I was getting his autograph.
Unlike all the people who brought cool things for James to sign, I didn't even realize an autograph was included in the pass I'd bought. So in the end I just got him to sign a blank page in the little notebook I carry around in my purse. This is the notebook where I write everything from ideas for fanfic to directions to my friends' houses. Ultimately, I think it's really neat to have James's signature in it.
Anyway, I'll probably tear out the page and frame it or something. *g*
The particular appeal of the signing, of course, is it gives the fan a moment or two to interact personally with the object of her fannishness. So here is my whole interaction with James Marsters:
[James shakes my hand]
Me: "I really enjoyed your character Spike."
James: "I had a ton of fun playing him."
Me: "I think I must've had just as much fun watching him!"
James: "Thanks!" [He shakes my hand again; I take my notebook and go.]
Yeah. Afterwards, I was so thrilled I was actually shaking a little. Dear god, when did I turn into such a fangirl?
Seriously, though, it's all in good fun.
I was totally impressed with James's ability to smile at me and talk with me and make me feel like I was important to him, considering he'd been doing the same thing for an unending stream of fans for three hours at that point, with more to come. But then, maybe it's not so hard to be thrilled to meet people who are thrilled to meet you. It must be something of a rush on the other end, too, right?
Anyway, that's the end of the story. I picked up my pre-autographed photo (which is now perched by the side of my bed) and went upstairs to meet my friend from the comic con for dinner.
I guess my only regret is that I didn't manage, in the end, to make contact with anyone from LJ-land. But that disappointment was overshadowed by the coolness of actually meeting a fellow slasher, not at the con itself, but in the house where I was staying! I was staying at a friend's place, but my friend himself was out of town, so I ended up just hanging out with his roommate (who I'd previously met only very briefly). And it turns out that she actually reads and writes fanfic! Including slash! We ended up hanging out on the porch until the wee hours, totally bonding. Awesomeness.
Okay, I'm going to post this, and then try to get the pictures off my camera. When I can get that to work I'll post them, too.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-31 05:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-01 10:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-31 05:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-31 05:53 pm (UTC)I'll very shortly post an account that she can read; I'm currently editing the above post for inclusion in my RL journal. (That is, removing all references to slash and putting in the LJ names of the RL friends mentioned in it.)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-31 05:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-31 05:53 pm (UTC)Loved your piccies in your next post, too!
It's always nice to read nice things about James, hope he's given you lots of inspiration for fic. :o]
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-01 10:14 am (UTC)I don't know if I'll ever do such a thing again (expensive, oh my!) but I'm definitely glad I did it this once!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-01 02:03 am (UTC)Thanks very much for the con report and the photos.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-01 10:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-01 11:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-02 04:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-02 07:36 pm (UTC)Good quality in an actor!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-02 12:54 pm (UTC)As for 'action figures', nah. They're dolls. They're a girl's. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-02 07:34 pm (UTC)