James Marsters

Becoming Piccolo

James Marsters on how his version of Piccolo will compare to the source material. by Eric Goldman

US, March 25, 2009 - James Marsters is very familiar to television fans for his great work in numerous villainous roles – most notably as Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, along with his work as Brianiac on Smallville and Captain John Hart on Torchwood. And in a few weeks, Marsters will be seen on the big screen playing another iconic villain – Piccolo, in Dragonball: Evolution.

IGN recently caught up with Marsters to find out what his version of Piccolo is like and how he compares to what fans of other incarnations of Dragonball are familiar with. As we learned, Marsters is quite knowledgeable on the subject...

IGN: Dragonball is a property that obviously has a huge following. When you signed on to the film, did you have any idea how large the fandom was?

Marsters: Oh, I’m one of them, yeah! I’ve seen every episode of Dragon Ball Z, about two thirds of GT, and about half of Dragon Ball — only because Dragon Ball, to me anyway, was hard to find. But yeah, I know it very well. In fact, I have a son who’s now into Jimi Hendrix more than Dragon Ball — he’s 13. He grew up watching it and it led to many good conversations, actually, between he and I. We have all of the little toys, and I always play Piccolo whenever we play with the action figures.

IGN: So when this part was even a possibility, I would assume both you and your son were excited.

Marsters: Very much. It was the first role that he cared about at all. And that’s normal – kids care if you’re there for Christmas. They care if you’re going to feed them on time. But finally, I got a role that he really was like, "Dad, that’s something I want to watch!" I play villains a lot and I remember one time I was playing a time agent, and I was telling my son, "Oh, dude. I’ve got swords. I’ve got guns. I’ve got this wrist strap. I can travel through time." And he goes, "Dad, do you win?" And I said, "What?" He goes, "Do you win at the end? Do you win or lose?" I said, "Well, I’m the villain. I lose." He goes, "Well… OK. Whatever."

IGN: You knew Piccolo very well going in. What is the take on him like in the film versus what most people know from Dragon Ball Z and other source material?

Marsters: This character is nothing like you’re going to recognize from Dragon Ball Z because this is a story that happens before Dragon Ball Z. In the actual source material that we were adapting, we were only dealing with Dragon Ball. In Dragon Ball, Lord Piccolo is a very old, kind of shriveled Namic. This green guy who has to walk with a walking stick, he’s so old. And at the very end of the season, when he finally fights little Goku – and Goku in the manga is only 7 years old – he throws off his coat and it’s actually kind of surprising he has a body left at all. So, my kind of template to do this Piccolo was, "Let’s make him as old as possible." We don’t want to make him as decrepit as the manga because he is the only villain for this part of the story of Goku, so we should make him maybe a little more powerful. But let’s not give the audience the young Piccolo yet, because in the story, Lord Piccolo comes back to the Earth to get the Dragonballs to wish himself young and then take over the Earth. And if we started Piccolo being young, there would be no reason for him to get the Dragonballs in the first place.

IGN: I’m very impressed talking to you about your knowledge of the source material. I’d assume some of your costars might have been a lot more unfamiliar with it all. Did anyone ever come to you for some advice?

Marsters: [Laughs] I think that if any of them didn’t know the source material going into the project, they certainly started reading it and watching it to prepare for the shoot because I didn’t really get the sense that anyone was behind the ball. We didn’t really talk about the plotline in Dragon Ball Z. There’s enough plotline to be talking about in Dragon Ball. But I didn’t start talking to them about Vegeta or Bojack and all of that – or Buu. [Laughs] I just kept my mouth shut about that because that’s just too complex.

IGN: Fans are always concerned when there’s an adaptation that it holds true to or respects the source material. As a fan yourself, can you speak to that?

Marsters: Well, that’s the thing, man. I think that we have made an artistic risk because we have decided to be very respectful of the source material. I think Akira Toriyama – I hope, I haven’t talked to him about it – but I suspect he would be pleased that we didn’t start this movie with Dragon Ball Z. That the first shot of our hero is not blond Goku firing a massive energy blast and wiping a mountain out. That would be very cool, but that’s not the beginning of the story. The beginning of the story, for the manga, is a 7 year old kid fighting midgets. He starts it way more on a smaller level and builds it up. And then by the time that Goku is that massive guy with the blond hair, then we’re more invested in him. And so, we have decided not to do Dragon Ball Z, but to do Dragon Ball.

Instead of having Goku as a 7 year old fighting midgets, we take him at 17, just on his 18th birthday, so thematically, we’re in the same ball park, but we get to push it a little more towards Z. But still doing justice to this character of Goku and where he starts. Remember in the first Spider-Man movie, everyone was like, "Where are all the special effects? Where is all the big stuff?" And Sam Raimi was like, "We’ve got to start this dude at the beginning. This is what we’re doing." And I think it would have been easier money if we would have just blown it out with Dragon Ball Z right from the beginning. But I don’t think that would have been as true to the story and to the source material. I’m kind of proud that we’ve taken the risk in trusting the audience and that they’ll want to see the beginning of this character. In that way, when he is more massive, it’ll be way cooler.

So I don’t know, man. People that only know Dragon Ball Z and only want Dragon Ball Z, they’re going to have to get used to this. But people that really know the material, they’re going to be well pleased.

IGN: You obviously have experience with makeup and prosthetics. How did this experience compare?

Marsters: Oh, man… The first time we did it, it took 14 hours. It was really mainly me being really specific about wanting to look older. They got all the pieces on fairly quickly. I forget how many there were, but there was something like 10 different pieces that made up the look. But it was the painting of them, where I kept going, "No, that’s not old enough! More here, more there." And by the end of it, the makeup artist was so mad at me, he just hit me. But I didn’t want to be young. I wanted to be as decrepit as possible. But we got it down to four hours. We were shooting 12 to 14 hours a day, and then I had another six [hours] to get in and out. So I had pretty long days.

IGN: Did you do much fight training for the film?

Marsters: Oh, yeah. There was a point at which I think Jim Wong, the director, kind of figured out that I was showing off for my girlfriend. Because every time he asked me to do some kind of insane wirework, I’d be like, "Oh, yeah. Let’s do it!" And so by the end of it, we were about at the last shot and I was just getting kicked in the face, actually, like about 14 times in a row. And I realized, "I’m not going to get a stunt man… this is the last day. We’re almost at the end of this. And I’m doing all my own stunts. This is very cool." Jim just has a very calm way of taking you one day at a time and making it seem like not such a deal. Not making you look at the whole mountain, but just take one step at a time. So yeah, we did train – we trained with the 8711, which is the fight crew that did 300, did the Bourne films. They do just a whole lot of good action movies. We went down to their facility here in Los Angeles for a month before we went to Durango, Mexico and trained there. Got nice and sore. And then went up to Durango, and Durango was a 1400 foot elevation. So that was a whole new level of getting fit. I passed out, dude. The first day we were training, they were running me pretty hard because we’d done well in L.A. and I just toppled right over. Just saw stars and was out. But after about 10 days, you acclimatize and your hemoglobin gets higher and you can wake back up.