James Marsters had plenty of geek credential thanks to his roles as Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Captain John Hart in Torchwood, but he could have appeared in the Star Trek franchise too – had he not completely bungled his audition.
In an interview with SyFy, Marsters said that he was in the running to play the role of Shinzon, the evil clone of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, which meant that he had to audition opposite Sir Patrick Stewart.
It didn't go well.
"I was horrible," he said. "I was God-awful in the audition, because I was fanboying out so hard to be in the same room with Jean-Luc Picard.
"I could see his face and he was pulling for me, he's trying to get me to act with him. And I could see in his eyes, 'Wow, this is not working at all, this kid is terrible'."
One audition that we wish James Marsters had fluffed was for Dragonball: Evolution, because then he would've avoided being in one of the worst films of all time.
However, he's still doing pretty well, career wise. It was recently announced that the actor will be appearing in the Marvel TV series Runaways, which will premiere on Hulu in the US in 2018.
He also reunited with his old Buffy castmates for the show's 20th anniversary, and told Digital Spy that he would be up for a revival in a heartbeat – with one condition.
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Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer and resident Welsh person at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016.
In his time he's covered a host of live events, interviewed celebrities big and small and crowbarred a countless amount of great/awful (delete as appropriate) puns into articles.
A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe's main interest is in video gaming. Although particularly a PlayStation gamer, he plays across Xbox, Nintendo and PC/Steam Deck, and likes to keep tabs on many games he's not got the time to play.
Joe currently does not use Twitter, but he only ever used it to tell people to watch the film Help! I'm a Fish (which you really should do).
