was wet in most of the takes. Hannigan joked that when they finally got the take she was not sure what she was doing acting-wise, she was just concerned with the appearance of the blood on the shirt remaining consistent. In a 2002 interview with the BBC, Benson stated that by the end of the filming of Tara's death scene, both she and Sarah Michelle Gellar were crying, as a close friend of theirs who had worked on the show had died just prior to filming. In the DVD commentary, James Marsters said that filming the scene in which Spike attempts to rape Buffy was one of the hardest he ever had to do. He has since said that he will never do such a scene again. That scene has also generated controversy between fans and the writers, but Marsters and writer Jane Espenson said that the moment was necessary to set up a powerful motivation for Spike's quest to gain a soul. Marsters would later say in 2012 that he understood the idea to have come from "a female writer, [who] had a situation in her life where she was and her boyfriend were breaking up and she decided if she just made love to him one more time, that they wouldn't break up. She ended up trying to force herself on him and decided to write about that. The thing is, if you flip it and make it a man forcing himself on a woman, I believe it becomes a whole different thing... I'm not really sure it expressed what the author was intending and on that score it was not successful."<ref>411mania Interviews: James Marsters (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel), 10th March 2012</ref> In her essay on sex and violence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer'', Gwyn Symonds calls the scene itself "technically and emotionally intricate" in that, unlike most depictions of attempted rape, it "encourages a complex audience engagement with both... the perpetrator and the victim." The action was "very carefully choreographed" according to James Marsters, with the camera alternating between close-ups of Buffy and Spike separately to reinforce the audience's shifting empathy with both Buffy and Spike. Writer Rebecca Rand Kirshner agrees that the viewer "could feel how [Spike's] very innards were twisted into this perversion of what he wanted," and she found that experiencing the scene from his perspective was additionally disturbing. Cast Starring Sarah Michelle