Fantastic Journey
When we spoke with Kevin Sorbo back in Issue 13, the actor best known for his portrayal of demi-God Hercules was just starting out on a new career path away from the Ancient World. With his science fiction series Andromeda nearing the end of its successful first season, the actor takes a breather to reflect on his second regular hit show and reminisce about the one which set him on his legendary journey. Interview by Sue Schneider.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 20
It's two years since Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, the show which catapulted then little-known Kevin Sorbo to worldwide fame, ceased production in New Zealand. The show not only created a star out of its lead actor, it also launched the incredibly popular spin-off series Xena: Warrior Princess, in which Sorbo made several guest appearances.
Two years on from filming the show's final episode, Full Circle, what is Sorbo's impression of his time on the series which made him a household name? “I felt I did a lot on Hercules,” he says after a moment’s thought. “I think that was one of the many reasons the show was a success. I'm not going to take all the credit! I think there were a lot of reasons why I felt I should have had an executive producer credit on the show, and I kind of fought for it for the last three years, but they never gave it to me.”
Although Sorbo knew that departing Hercules was the right thing to do, in retrospect, he admits that the decision was a difficult one to make at the time. “Universal wanted me to go three more years on it, and it was a big thing to turn down, with that financial commitment of three more years,” he explains. “But I had reached a point of being in New Zealand for almost seven years, and it was enough. I was down there 10 months a year - that’s a long shooting schedule. But I had faith in myself as an actor, and I knew I was going to get something else. I had to believe that I wasn’t going to starve!
“The last three years on the show were very good to me,” he adds. “I just wanted to do something different. I really did.”
That something different, of course, was Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda. The brainchild of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, the science fiction series came along at the ideal time, offering Sorbo the opportunity to play series lead Dylan Hunt, the captain of the starship Andromeda Ascendant. “When I was wrapping up on Hercules, I was looking at a couple of network shows,” the actor recalls. “They came to me and threw all this stuff at me: 44 show guarantee; in season two I’ll get the actual executive producer credit on it...
“I think the show is going really well,” he enthuses. “We’re the first show since Star Trek: The Next Generation to debut at number one in syndication. Obviously the studio, Tribune, are very excited. As with any new series, you take a look at the first year, and whether it’s a sitcom or an hour drama or a science fiction show like this, it takes a while to get your characters together and work out who they are. We spent most of this year talking about the development of the characters and their back stories - who they were; where they came from - things like that.”
Sorbo is very excited about what’s coming up in the concluding episodes of the show’s first season “We have a cliffhanger in May which is a huge epic show,” he reveals. “It will force the crew to bond together, because the universe is seriously in trouble. If they don’t get together, there’s no hope whatsoever. So it’s a nice cliffhanger, and you won’t know who’s going to survive and who’s not going to survive...
“I’m very excited for next year, as well,” he adds. “They’re writing scripts for the season right now. I think this year is going to finish with a bang, and next season is going to be amazing.
“Tribune is already talking about seasons five and six. I’m going, ‘God, let’s get through season one first!’ But it’s exciting to hear it, and I think we’ve got a really good show. I think that the diversity of the characters keeps a wide range of people interested in the way the show is going.”
Sorbo has had a lot of say in the way the show has been going. “I’ve picked and chosen directors along with the other producers on the show,” he reveals. “We chose the cast. I’ve had a lot of say in terms of what I think my character should be doing. I really wanted everybody to develop as equally as would possibly make sense for the series. I didn’t want to always be the lead in the show.”
While Andromeda is the brainchild of Gene Roddenberry, the show is very different from that originally conceived by Star Trek’s legendary creator. “What we ended up doing is taking two different projects that he had written back in 1970 and sort of meshing them together,” Sorbo explains. “One was called The Phoenix Ascendants, and the other was called Andromeda. There was an argument initially over what the title of the show should be, but Andromeda won out because I think it’s a better name for a show. Captain Dylan Hunt is a character that Gene liked a lot. He wrote him in two other pilots, and John Saxon actually played him in a 1970 pilot that never aired.”
The fans of Hercules have responded well to Sorbo’s move from the Ancient World to the future. “Two per cent of the Hercules fans are so upset that I left the series,” he says sadly. “But a lot of the Hercules fans have said, ‘I love Hercules, but this Andromeda is really cool!' They’re behind it. I’m getting people coming up to me and not going ‘Herc!’, but going, ‘Captain, how are you doing?’, which is really kind of cool!
“People are aware of Andromeda and, for me personally, I dropped 20 pounds; I cut off eight inches of hair... It was strange to change something physically and move into a character that is not the same as Hercules - although Dylan’s still a highly moralistic guy. He’s a hero. He’s good over evil. But for me it’s fun to do something different like this, and I think the fans are very excited.”
However, Sorbo is the first to admit that had it not been for the popularity of Hercules, people may not have taken such an interest in Andromeda. “I think that’s one of the reasons it started as a hit, pardon my ego, but I told the other cast members that this show was going to rate very highly off the bat because of me and because of Gene Roddenberry. After that, once you get into the third or fourth month of a show, it’s got to be good or people won’t continue to watch it.”
One particular talent gained from working on Hercules which Sorbo felt would be advantageous to Andromeda, for example, was his ability to adlib. “I said to [executive producer] Robert [Hewitt Wolf], ‘One thing that I do is I adlib and I change things,’” he explains. “‘I don’t change your idea. I don’t change the script. But there are things that happen during blocking and rehearsals that change.’ It happened all the time during the fight scenes on Hercules. A lot of those one-liners were from Michael [Hurst, lolaus] and myself.”
Talking about Hercules causes Sorbo to pause for a minute and become nostalgic about his time on the series. Given how much of his career was spent in New Zealand, it's not surprising that even two years down the line, there are still aspects of the show that he misses. “I miss working with Michael,” he admits of his co-star Michael Hurst. “I miss working with the cast. But as beautiful as New Zealand was, I’m grateful to be back in North America. I love Vancouver. Vancouver is a great city for me. The people are great. The lifestyle is great. And I can pop down here in two and a half hours!
“What’s good about this show is that I get three days off. I get one day off every other episode. So I get a three-day weekend. So I’ll just fly home and it breaks up the work.”
The good news for Sorbo - not to mention for fans of Xena and Hercules, of course - is that former Hercules co-star Michael Hurst will be guest-starring in the second season of Andromeda. “We are going to have Michael on next season,” he confirms. “And Bruce Campbell (Autolycus). Michael will play a Magog, and he’s going to be a caricature of that Australian guy who does all those natural Geography programmes, the one that goes, 'Oi, there's a lot of rattlesnakes in here and they’re really scary little buggers!’ You know the guy - he does that FedEx commercial! So he’s going to be a Magog bounty hunter playing in that vein!”
Talking about guest-starring roles, Sorbo recently appeared in a two-part episode of the popular US sitcom Dharma and Greg, playing a college professor who develops a crush on Dharma. “I was supposed to be in Hawaii celebrating my third anniversary with my wife, but they called me up and said, ‘Would you like to do this?’ he recalls. “I’d worked with [executive producer] Chuck Lorrie back in 1995 on a Cybil episode, and I did a Just Shoot Me episode last year, so my agents are well aware that I love comedy. That was what Hercules was to me - a comedy. That’s what the whole love of the show was about. I’ve always wanted to do a sitcom, so I talked to Chuck and said yes.
“I play a history professor in college who’s going through a very messy divorce,” Sorbo explains. “Dharma comes into my classroom to take notes for a guy who’s sick. She ends up loving my class and decides she wants to go back and get her college degree, and I say she’s more than welcome to come to my class. But she then tells me she hasn’t even graduated from high school yet. There’s a compatibility between the characters in terms of sense of humour and intelligence. So what happens in the course of the first show is that a crush sort of develops between the both of us.”
Sorbo and his wife Sam are regular watchers of the sitcom. “I’m a big fan and my wife is a huge fan,” he admits. “That’s why she said, ‘Hawaii can wait; do Dharma and Greg!’
With Dharma and Greg now behind him and production on Andromeda's first season in the can, Sorbo is eager to explore further acting opportunities. “I would love to do a feature film,” he enthuses. “The unfortunate thing is that the couple I looked at doing I now won’t be able to because of the time element. Due to the writers’ and actors' strikes, we’ve already started to shoot the second season of Andromeda. The studio wants to get 10 episodes in the can before 1 July, when myself and Keith Hamilton Cobb will have to walk because we’re the only Americans on the show. The other five actors are Canadian. Those 10 shows will at least carry us into Christmas of this year.”
Beyond Andromeda and his plans to star in a feature film, time permitting, would Sorbo contemplate returning to the Ancient World to play his half immortal alter ego? “It’s hard to say,” he responds. “I’m kind of complete with it now. If they did a feature film and they did it the same way Paramount took the Star Trek features - that is, make a feature film rather than a TV movie, throw the money at it and make it big - I would do it.”
The actor pauses for a moment to contemplate. “Yeah, I would,” he affirms.