Dean There, Been That
Dean O’Gorman is a regular guest star in Renaissance Pictures productions, best known for his role as the young lolaus in Hercules and Young Hercules. Taking time off during a recent British Xena convention, the actor spoke to Xena Magazine about his roles in Xena: Warrior Princess, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Young Hercules. Interview by Ian Rentoul.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 16
Dean O'Gorman’s acting career got off to an early start. His first role, at the tender age of 12, was in a pilot for an Australian television show. “I was into plays and drama at school, and probably without realising it, that was the way I was headed,” he says. “Then I got my first part in a television show, and I thought, ‘I quite like this,’ because I got time off school to play around!
“It didn’t really become a viable career option until I left school, and I went straight from school to acting. My first professional stage appearance was in an open air production of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. That was my first experience of performing live to an audience outside school. I liked it. The majority of my experience has been with television and film. I’d say that I enjoy those more than theatre, but that’s not to say I wouldn’t also enjoy theatre if I did more of it.”
Asked to recall how he came to star as young lolaus in Renaissance's Young Hercules series, O'Gorman responds with his trademark wit. “Whenever I’m asked, ’How did you get the role in Young Hercules,’ the first reply that comes to mind is, ‘I had to sleep with a lot of people’,” Dean O'Gorman laughs.
“There was nothing out of the ordinary about the way I got the part in Young Herc,” the actor explains, adopting a more serious tone. “I went to an audition, got a callback and then got the part.”
O’Gorman was offered the chance to audition for the role of the young lolaus after successfully portraying a character in an episode of Xena’s first season. “I played Homer in the episode Athens City Academy of the Performing Bards,” O’Gorman recalls, “and the director who was doing the Young Hercules pilot saw it and thought I might be good as lolaus.”
O’Gorman remembers his first and only Xena guest appearance fondly, and one of his highlights of the hour was acting opposite Renee O’Connor. “It was the first time I’d met Renee, and I think she is a really lovely person,” he admits. “We got along very well, and the story centered a lot on the relationship between our two characters. While some actors find there's a spark between their characters, others really have to work at it. But we got on really well. And it was a good story. It had a bit of heart to it. So I had fun, and Renee’s cool!”
However, O'Gorman's experiences with Renaissance Pictures go back even further than Xena’s first season. “I appeared in the season one Hercules episode The Gauntlet,” he reveals of the episode which also guest-starred Lucy Lawless as Xena. “I played Horan. That was six years ago now, but it was good working at the start of it all.
“I played Hercules' cousin,” O'Gorman expands, “who obviously got the short gene in the family! My agent put me up for the part and I just auditioned for it. But it was weird because I was a lot shorter than Hercules and much weaker. Maybe it was the blonde hair that made the producer pick me. I don’t know.
“The role was that of the serious young man, and that was the one episode that Michael [Hurst] wasn't in,” O'Gorman continues. “So I really played Hercules' sidekick. That was kind of funny because it sort of foreshadowed what was going to happen later in Young Hercules.”
Of course, turning to Hercules’ sidekick himself, how much did O'Gorman draw on Michael Hurst's characterisation of the older lolaus in developing his own version of the character? “T.J. Scott, who directed the pilot, and the other Young Hercules directors, had already worked with Michael a lot,” O'Gorman recalls, “so they would say, ‘well, Michael lends to play it this way, so I think it would be helpful if you did this…’
“It’s not that I was trying to imitate Michael in any way,” O’Gorman points out. “He has a unique style, and it would be like being someone I'm not. It’s also disrespectful to copy someone or take aspects of them. The directors acknowledged that, and they’d just tweak a performance by saying, ‘lolaus reacts in this kind of way and maybe you should pay tribute to that,’ because maybe I would want to play a scene in a more humorous way than was intended. Sometimes the directors would know the character better than I did, because they had previously worked with Michael.
“When I started developing young lolaus, there weren’t many Hercules episodes to refer to,” O'Gorman remembers, “and Michael's character had changed a lot from the early TV movies. In the early days, the character was much more restrained.”
O'Gorman has a great deal of respect for Michael Hurst’s abilities both in front of and behind the camera, although he laments the fact that he didn't have much opportunity to work with the talented Kiwi. “Michael never directed any episodes of Young Hercules,” he points out. “but I would have liked him to have done so. I’ve seen him direct on stage and he's really great.
“I did do one scene with him at the beginning of the Young Hercules pilot, where he appears as a jewellery salesman. He was great, and we both did a lot of improvising. It was a little wink to the audience because he was dressed up as a different character, but it was still lolaus talking to lolaus!”
O’Gorman played opposite two different actors as the young Hercules in the series: Ian Bohen in the pilot and Ryan Gosling in the series proper, and the actor admits that he had a different approach to working opposite the two actors. “lolaus reacts a lot to Hercules, and Ian’s take on Hercules was very different to Ryan’s,” he acknowedges. “Something I was conscious of was that people would watch the show to see if I was like Michael, but I soon found my own niche and my own way to play the character. I also thought that people would look at the show and say, ‘Well, Michael can be funny; let's see if you can’.”
With about 22-23 minutes of screen footage needed for each episode, Young Hercules had a very fast turnaround. “We would shoot in four episode blocks,” O'Gorman recalls. “These were done in about two weeks per episode, so we didn’t get a lot of rehearsal time. But the crew and I had previously worked together, so the dynamic was already there. And we didn't need a lot of preparation for each episode. We just went out there and shot them.
“We had three directors,” O'Gorman notes, “and they were all very much open to any suggestions we had as to how to do things. So we would try to get as many jokes in as possible, experiment and put things in before it all got locked down. There was rarely any rehearsal time, so it was in the moment on set where we got the freedom to try things and add a few lines. But we got quite a lot of preparation time for the stunts and fighting," he adds, “because that needed to be rehearsed.
“On average, we were on set for about 12 hours a day,” O’Gorman reveals, “and each episode took three to four days to shoot, not including Second Unit time. The Second Unit's work was quite pressured and rushed, but those guys did a great job. I had both a stand-in [Matt Brown] and a body double, and they'd have the same hair and be wearing the same costume as I was, which was kind of freaky!
Unfortunately, O'Gorman didn't get to do many of his own stunts. “The only real stunts I did was when I fell over all the time!” he admits sheepishly. “I wanted to do more of my own stunts, but because of time, much of that work was done by the stuntmen on Second Unit. In truth, Hercules got a lot of the fights and I would do more flips or jumps. Where there was a chance that we might actually break a part of our bodies, we’d let the stuntman do it! But the stunt department was really great, and they liked to involve the actors wherever they could, particularly in the fights.
“I got my nose broken on one occasion,” he remembers. “We were in a stunt fight during which I was supposed to get a bucket kicked out of my hand, but I had the bucket too close to my head so it was knocked onto my nose! I didn’t realise it at the time, so I kept on going. When I sat down I felt fine, but my body suddenly decided to go into shock and everybody was really worried. I thought they were worrying about me, but it was just that they needed to get through the shooting schedule!
“I had to go to hospital and turned up there in my lolaus costume with a broken nose and wearing leather trousers, and the nurses were like, ‘What the hell?’ The doctor looked at me as if to say, ‘What were you doing?' because I was wearing the leather, the sword, the boots, the gauntlets and the jerkin. So while I was lying there in this hospital bed, the doctor was trying not to laugh!
“I hurt myself all the time, but it's not anyone’s fault,” O'Gorman muses. ‘‘It’s not that I'm particularly uncoordinated, it’s just that when I get tired I fall over! I hit things and trip over them!”
One of O'Gorman's regular co-stars on Young Hercules was fellow Kiwi actor Kevin Smith, who played (amongst other characters) the gods Ares and Bacchus. “I’d never work with him again,” he jokes. “Actually, Kev, Ryan and me all had a great time on Young Hercules and got along really well. We'd laugh all the time and keep making jokes. In the episode Con Ares, Kevin had to play a peasant farmer who looked like Ares, but who turned out to be just downbeat and stupid. We had a great time in that episode; it was hilarious and really good fun.
“Kevin was just like us and wanted to put as many jokes into the show as possible. Young Hercules is a lot less serious than Xena and Hercules, and I think he enjoyed it as much as we did.”
Another regular on Young Hercules was Meighan Desmond, who reprised her role as the goddess Discord. “I’d worked with Meighan before on the New Zealand soap Shortland Street,” O’Gorman reveals. “It was a great cast and everyone liked the show and was committed to it.”
So does O’Gorman have a preference for a particular type of Hercules, Xena or Young Hercules episode? “I like both the comedies and the dramas,” he says. “It’s good to have a bit of drama and tension in some shows. We did an episode of Hercules called Twilight where there were big battles and explosions. We were working in mud, and the director wanted it to look really dirty, so we were running around everywhere and there was mud and blood. That was cool!
Are there any other roles O’Gorman would like to have played for Renaissance Pictures? “I would have liked to play Julius Caesar,” he says after a pause. “I love the roles where you get to be the leader of an army and you get to take your troops into battle. All that stuff is great, and that’s why I love these shows. I love the fighting and the battle sequences and all the action. The majority of acting jobs are nothing like that. Being drama orientated, I like those as well,” he quickly clarified: “but for these shows you can get out and get dirt and run around.”
So what direction would O’Gorman like his career to take in the future? “I’d ultimately like to do some directing,” he admits, “but for the present, acting is where I’m headed. Before I do any directing, I know I need a lot more experience.
“The great thing about Young Hercules is I really got to see that filmmaking is dependent on so many different things. In the end, the directors were very open to suggestions, and I was allowed to direct a scene on the show. So the thought of directing has become less daunting now.
“I used to think, ‘No way could I tell a crew what to do’, but now directing would be creatively satisfying. So I would like to write, produce and create my own project.”