Conversing with Lucy Lawless
A Fan Club Exclusive
Reported by Sharon Delaney
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 03
I seem to be having these interviews earlier and earlier. This one is at 7:30 am New Zealand time.
“You’re up, Lucy?”
“Mmph.” (I take that for a yes.)
“You’re sure?”
“Murfanly.” (“Murfanly”!! Could that be “Certainly”?)
“You’re eating breakfast!” I said, finally getting the picture.
“Just sculling some of Daisy’s leftover pizza from last night,” Lucy says, laughing.
[Now, what would a Warrior Princess have as a pizza topping? I wondered as I started to write this interview. Cheese? Pepperoni? Pineapple? The red stuff that goes on top of the big dumplings that Gabrielle makes? Croisus? Sliced Akbash? Body parts leftover in the fridge from her days in Chin…? There’s a tap on my shoulder. “Ah, Sharon - it was veggie pizza.” Oops, sorry, Xena. Guess I was getting carried away. (sheepish grin)]
“I went to get gas this morning,” I said to Lucy, “and got propositioned by the gas station attendant. So, what I want to know is how you get Donald Trump asking you out when you were doing ‘Grease’ in New York and I get the gas station attendant?”!”
“Oh, well, you were lucky. I don’t know how you got so lucky, Sharon,” she laughed.
I think most women wonder what Donald Trump uses as a come-on line. Does he try to impress people?
“Well, he doesn’t need to, you know. I’m sure he doesn’t need to work hard. And he didn’t come gunning for me if that’s what you’re asking. He was not the least offensive. I think after we’d been chatting, he thought, here’s somebody I get on with. But obviously I had very little time for socializing during that time.”
Busy doing “Grease” and being proposed to! I hastened to let Lucy know that Xena fans had closed ranks around her and Rob and posted “Off Limits” signs whenever anyone tried to discuss their upcoming wedding.
“You’re kidding? Aren’t they amazing! I thank them for being discreet,” she said with a sigh of relief.
I then proceeded to tell her about a conversation I’d had with a college friend the night before about a class we’d had in “trust.” The exercise goes like this: Your classmates make a circle and you stand in the middle with your eyes closed. Then you let yourself fall. The idea being that you have to trust them to catch you! Could she do that?
“Oh yeah. I’ve done it plenty,” she answered.
“Do you find it easy to trust people?” I followed up.
“I can once I’ve decided they’re trust-worthy. And if they don’t live up to it. I’ll be able to pick myself up,” she said without sounding the least bit doubtful.
My mind was wandering back toward weddings, honeymoons, travel to faraway places - hey! How about that travel show she did called “Holiday.” I wondered if the free tickets to foreign ports of call played any part in her taking the job.
“First off, it was a job and I wanted to be part of show business, have a crack at being a presenter and see how well I’d do. The free tickets certainly didn’t detract from the job. And I am genuinely interested in and find it quite easy to converse with people from other countries. I find them endlessly fascinating,” she said enthusiastically.
“You went to Hong Kong?” I asked.
“Yeah! It was my first job ever. It was amazing! It was the most astonishing place because I’d never desired to go to Asia prior to that. I realized the people I was meeting over there had almost no aspect of their lives in common with me - in terms of the way they perceive space, money, the things they value. I found them very intriguing.”
“The way they perceive ‘space’?” I queried.
“Their whole concept of personal space is different,” she responded. “Time is money to us and to them space is money. For example, they’ll keep people moving through their restaurants. They like the turnover to be really fast because space is at a premium even more than time.”
As a former New York City dweller, I recognized “island” mentality. Try walking down a sidewalk in Manhattan when it’s raining and you’ll notice that the regular denizens of the city give no quarter when it comes to passing another person with an open umbrella. You can spot the tourists cuz they tilt their umbrellas to the side to let another person pass. The natives would just as soon poke you in the eye! (grin)
At the recent Burbank convention in January, I had talked a bit with Kevin Smith (who plays Ares) about the cultural differences between Americans and New Zealanders when it comes to personal space. We tend to stand closer and make more direct eye contact which can be unnerving to a New Zealander and probably is something Americans should take into account when visiting that country.
“Kevin and I discussed that and we decided the American sensibility wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Americans are more comfortable and more approachable. Whereas here, people are more standoffish. One way to look at it is that you might think they are being more respectful, but, in fact, it’s about people here feeling inhibited. They don’t always feel comfortable within themselves to come out and say, ‘G’day, how’re you doing.’”
“Then again, I wonder if some of the American attitude comes from simply not caring if they’re treading on your territory,” I said.
“Well, I meet those people here, too,” she said. “And Kevin gets a different response than I do. He’s a big man, people treat him like one of the boys in the hood, you know? Whereas I get a slightly different response. We have our share of people who just don’t care about your space.”
I wondered if Kevin had talked with her about his first convention with Creation.
“Yes, he did. He thought it was terrific and weird. He enjoyed the whole experience. How many people get the opportunity to be in a role that inspires that kind of focus. Just the ratio of one to two thousand is kind of ridiculous. Gives you a little taste of what it must be like to be a rock star,” she laughed.
“I suspect that Xena would qualify as a pre-Mycenean rock star,” I joked, which evoked laughter on the other end of the line.
I had a couple of questions about recent Xena episodes that I wanted to ask. “So, about that opening scene of ‘The Bitter Suite’ where Xena on Argo drags Gabrielle by a rope around her ankles over about 12 miles of countryside! Any comment?”
“Well, I thought it would be a whole lot shorter!! I’m only in, say, two of those shots and the rest is a poor stuntie called Robert Lee, who’s an ex-jockey, being dragged behind a tractor. It was pretty savage and so prolonged,” she said in awe. “I was surprised by the finished product.”
I brought up the fact that most people thought “Bitter Suite” was an incredible piece of episodic television, but some wished for more working out of the Rift between Xena and Gabrielle. For most, the use of music and song to express Xena and Gabrielle’s emotions just made it all the more heartbreaking and touching and I suspected that was one of the reasons it was done that way. There’s nothing like a good song to tear your heart apart. Lucy’s answer showed this was something she had been thinking about.
“People have said to me, why can’t you build the characters slowly as in NYPD Blue? They’ve got a luxurious growth of the characters. We can’t afford to do that! We have two main characters with a few recurring guest stars. If we were to explore Xena and Gabrielle in depth, it would take one season, end of story! It would be lugubrious at best. It would be positively turgid! Xena is also an action show. I’m sorry, but we cannot stand around talking about our feelings endlessly. It’s a totally different formula. It’s not like we’re trying to stifle it. It demands a lot more movement physically and emotionally.”
Speaking of action - “About that fight scene in ‘One Against An Army’- Xena battling 400 bad guys!” I laughed.
“Oh, my god, that was a killer - that was a killer!” she moaned.
“Was that the longest fight scene you’ve ever done?” I asked.
“Yes, it was, and it went over two days. It was 50 stunties, a crew of 50, and me and Renee in the hottest studio I think I’ve ever worked in. Really small and extremely hot and dirty and everybody trying to keep cool in every possible way.”
“Is that why we saw Xena actually sweat for the first time during a fight?” I laughed.
“Really?! Could be,” she said, with an obvious grin in her voice. “And another thing that happened is Renee’s ankle was just about broken! You know when the guy jumps down through the roof and lands in front of her during the nightmare sequence? He landed on her foot. It was under a blanket and her ankle went ‘crunch.’ The poor girl was hobbling around and in the next episode we filmed, we had to write it into the script.”
“Ow!” - Lucy’s sound effects as she described Renee’s ankle being stomped were very vivid and extremely painful to contemplate.
She continued: “And I had a bad knee from the episode before when I’d dismounted a horse. It was just a silly thing that ordinarily wouldn’t have hurt me, but because I had the BIG accident, I just stiffened me up totally and pulled a ligament. So here’s Renee and I both in misery having to do the episode,” she laughed.
“Two fearless warriors with their ace bandages,” I chimed in.
“Yeah. One’s repeatedly falling off horses and one gets her leg broken.” More unrestrained laughter from the Warrior Actress.
Okay, enough with the comedy routine - we both pull ourselves together and… Nope, the laughter is continuing through the phone line. What is Lucy going to recount now!
“Did I tell you about the time when Ted, Renee and I were filming ‘Fins, Femmes and Gems’? It was a Thursday. We’d been working out in the sun all day - had a bit of a barbeque and then I went to a friend’s place for a party. I went to bed at midnight, but couldn’t get to sleep. I woke up about five and could not get through the next day! There are some really great bloopers when Lucy just cannot get her lines right,” she laughed. “I went to the back of the set and fell asleep and they didn’t bother waking me for my ‘off’lines. No more parties on weekdays!” she laughed.
A recipe for disaster and hilarious outtakes - order up one very hot day, the smallest of studios, toss in an afternoon barbecue and just a pinch of late-night revelry. A confluence of events even the most stoic Warrior Princess couldn’t overcome and which left the actress portraying her dissolving into giggles the next day at the most inappropriate times. Makes for some great bloopers, but, “I’ll never do that again!”
Gabrielle - write that down in your scroll!