From “Grease” To China: On the Road with Lucy Lawless
By Sharon Delaney
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 02
Do I dare confess that I started this phone interview with the words, “Rise and Shine! Rise and Shine!” What possessed me? Thank God Lucy has a terrific sense of humor and it functions at eight o’clock in the morning. I think the fact that there was half a world between us also played a part in my obnoxiously perky good humor. Luckily, neither Lucy nor her alter ego, Xena, had at hand the Lao Ma energy bolts that were so devastatingly brandished in “The Debt,” and I felt smugly safe curled up on the couch in my pajamas.
For some reason I was blissfully oblivious of the havoc that a Warrior Princess could wreak if so inclined. Then the image of Joxer with a chakram sticking out of his chest came to mind, and I quickly sobered up. Well, as sober as you can be with someone whose easy laugh is so contagious.
Hey, it was morning in New Zealand and Lucy had probably just gotten up. Was she padding about in her bunny slippers too? “Yeah,” she said, yawning, “me too. How’re you doin’?”
Actually, I have no idea what she was wearing on her feet. I could hear the refrigerator door opening and pots rattlin. Ah, the price of fame - can’t even have a quiet bagel nosh. And who’s to say that Salmoneus hasn’t stocked the downtown Poteidaia shoe outlet with the latest in rabbit footwear.
“I hear you’re going to be in the Auckland Christmas Parade,” I said. Lucy is making her first appearance in the parade and her comments about how warm it was down there invoked images of Santa Claus guiding his reindeer in shorts and beach thongs. But having relocated to sunny California from the frozen tundra of New York City, I have this conspiratorial smile on my face as I mention it’s seventy degrees on my balcony as we speak.
“Yeah, I felt well rested when I came back from ‘Grease’ and I signed up for lots of holiday duties. I’m also singing in ‘Christmas in the Park’ and launching an appeal for the Starship Hospital Children’s Heart Unit. I guess I should be practicing my carols,” she laughed.
“Have you made out your Christmas list yet?” I queried.
“No, we don’t really do that down here. New Zealand in general is not hugely present orientated. There’s not the pressure to buy everybody you know presents and I think Renee’s finally clicked on to that,” she said with a grin in her voice.
I wondered if Renee’s first clue was the vast expanse of emptiness under her Christmas tree. And all the cheerful New Zealanders wishing her Merry Christmas and noticing their houses were filled more with good wishes than presents. Definitely no sign of rampant American consumerism down there!
“Speaking of ‘Grease,’” I said. “Glad you did it, glad it’s over?”
“Yeah. And I’m even more glad I did it now because I love those people,” she said warmly. “It was a wonderful opportunity and it’s not the career for me - doing the same thing over and over again. I’m so spoiled for material doing Xena. Every night I wanted to take that character (Rizzo) further and further and see what evolved.
“I loved New York. Daisy came over and we had this great family time there. Such happiness. And New Yorkers are really positive, don’t you find?”
I had stayed in Manhattan for the first time in eight years and realized I didn’t want to live there again, but liked the feeling that it was my town and I knew how to get about in it. I asked her, “Did you realize you don’t wait for the street lights there? You just zigzag across and keep both eyes peeled for gaps between the cars that you can sneak through.”
“That’s right,” she said, laughing. “I spotted that early on.”
She had said in a number of interviews that she found Americans bighearted and I wondered why she noticed that trait in particular.
“It’s just the difference between our countries,” she explained. “We are warmhearted in a far different way. Tall Poppy Syndrome is a very common phenomenon here where if a poppy grows up too tall, they’ll chop the neck off - they get too far above the other poppies, you know. So, culturally, we don’t like people to get too big for their boots. And I realized as a young kid that if I wanted to become famous all over, I was going to have to work very hard and very quietly and not crow about it.
“People don’t want to hear about you on the way up. You’ve got to wait until you get there and then they’ll go, ‘Oh, yeah, she’s one of us.’ I learned early in my career to just shut my mouth and not big note - not talk too big about my hopes and dreams and aspirations which is kind of sad, I think. Whereas Americans will embrace that and, you know, it’s a nation that’s founded on dreams, big dreams.”
She’s got a very good point there. We certainly tend to believe the impossible is just around the corner. And people may laugh at someone’s grandiose schemes, but they’ll do it behind your back. I think we feel we might jinx our own chances if we rain on someone else’s parade of dreams.
Speaking of taking chances - I decided to bring up the subject of the Rift taking place between Xena and Gabrielle. I asked what her thoughts were when she heard what was planned for the two characters.
“I thought it was good and it’s a way of developing our characters. They can’t stay the same forever. Eventually it’s going to pall. All the drama in Xena is between people, everything is the relationship between the two characters and that’s the way we like it. But I’m pleased to say the Rift is now over (for us).”
Was it tough on Lucy and Renee when the characters were at such odds with each other? Are those hard scenes to play?
She laughed. “It’s not hard because we enjoy working together. It’s absolutely not real and in between takes, Renee and I are yakkin’ about our private lives. We’re not method actors. We come in and do it and they call cut and we go back to talking about Renee’s Thanksgiving dinner.”
Oops - Lucy’s glancing down at her watch and realizes it’s time to wake her daughter. Actress, Warrior Princess and Daisy’s personal alarm clock - she really does have many skills!
I mention that I just talked to Renee about her brush with motherhood in “Gabrielle’s Hope.” Did Lucy give her any advice about how to portray giving birth to the baby in that episode? I told her Renee had said that Lucy was the one person she could be frustrated with and who knew exactly what she was talking about. Renee referred to it as the “woman giving birth blaming the husband”-type situation.
She laughed. “We know when to back off from each other and we understand. Having said she’s not a method actress, when Renee’s doing something intense, she doesn’t want to be bothered.
“Also, the director got sick after one day and had to be replaced by somebody who had had no preparation, Andrew Merrifield, who did a great job, but it was very stressful to everybody. That was a really difficult episode.”
Made easier, I suspect, by the trust these two actresses have in each other and in their working relationship.
Renee said she got “clucky” for the first time. Had she said anything to Lucy?
“Hmmm. No, she didn’t,” Lucy said.
And did Lucy, herself, have any “clucky” feelings?
“Yeah, I did, actually,” she laughed.
“All those babies on the set got to you, huh?” I teased.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” laughing harder.
“Did Rob talk to you about what he had in mind for Xena’s backstory?” I wondered.
“You know, if he mentions things, my eyes just glaze over. I don’t know why it is. It’s not that I try to be this way, it just seems to be the kind of animal I am that I don’t like talking about work outside of working hours. There’s no rhyme or reason as to when I’ll be interested in talking about it. Usually I just change the subject. He might have mentioned it a couple of times, but I don’t go there.”
And would Lucy have betrayed Xena?
“No, I don’t think any of us would have. I thought that was the weak point in the story, actually,” she said. “Renee had a really tough part in that show. She had to play the little whiner and only Renee can play that kind of part and give that character some integrity.”
Watching it, I told her. I realized the focus was on Xena’s story, so they really didn’t have time to build up any rationale for Gabrielle; one of the disadvantages of only having 44 minutes to work with. I was so intrigued by the look into Xena’s past that I was wishing it were a 6-hour miniseries.
Lucy offered. “It could have been a feature.”
This surprised me because she had said in the past she wouldn’t do a Xena movie during hiatus. Why has she changed her mind?
“Because I did ‘Grease,’” she laughed. “But the conditions would have to be right. It would have to be the right kind of budget. None of us want to make anything crummy. And it can’t be like a great big episode. It has to be a proper feature and Rob has to have the time to prepare it. Unfortunately, I think that time’s been and gone. If Universal doesn’t bite at it soon, it might never happen.”
“The Debt” certainly looked to be one of the most physically challenging episodes - the wooden stock “necklace,” mud, staying under water so long the audience was hyperventilating trying to hold their breath along with Xena.
“Filming Rob’s episodes are always the most (physically) uncomfortable,” she explained. “Those ideas came from Rob’s reading and he has really strong instincts about what he wants to see on screen.”
How was it having that thing around your neck?
She laughed. “Oh my God. It was really heavy! It was really heavy. It was just revolving. It wobbled. It was made out of a kind of foam, but it actually dried solid like a resin. So it was pretty blooming heavy.”
And to be thrown into the dungeon filled with water as well as having that thing around her neck! Why?
“It looks good. And it makes you, the audience, feel something. I love that.”
What was that stuff they smeared all over her?
“Mud! Freezing clay. It’s amazingly cold stuff. And I don’t like doing sort of naked things. I find them humiliating to shoot, frankly,” she said.
I pointed out that Xena had never had to take off her armor before to sneak into a castle.
“Rob says, ‘Logic is the enemy to drama.’ He specifically wanted that image of me coming up out of the water with the knife in my teeth from early on,” she explained. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it, but it looks good.”
And the scene where Lao Ma hid her from Ming Tzu in the hot tub?
“I hate being wet and cold, but that water was pretty warm. When you go flat on your back in a bath and have to reach up to get the kiss of life from somebody, some water goes down your nose, but it just made such a cool episode. All those things were worth it for the episode.”
Speaking of cool, I couldn’t resist asking this next question about something I noticed in “Been There, Done That” - How long has Xena been sucking her thumb!
“You spotted that?” she said, laughing gleefully. “That was just a stupid joke. I just did it on that take. If I’d given them an option, they probably would have cut it out. Did many people notice that?”
I told her that Rob Field (editor) said there were two or three takes and he picked the subtlest one.
“It wasn’t very clear,” she said, obviously pleased with herself.
Well, it’s now part of Xena.
“That’s right. That’s how it happens. Somebody on the crew will get a goofy idea and we’ll all snigger at it and so we put it in the script.”
We talked a bit about bloopers and people working together on the set, supporting each other, taking each other’s working habits into consideration and the feeling of equality that is needed to allow everyone to do their job. There is a natural tendency to give more weight to the feelings of a lead actor in a show. The crew might be more afraid of treading on Lucy’s toes than she on their’s. And it brought this response from her.
“That’s right. I try and keep an eye on not getting too big for my boots. It can get away from you if you start to believe your own importance. Just because people are paid to be nice to you doesn’t mean you’re worth more.”
“Paid to be nice to you” - I found that a rather chilling insight into the life of a famous person. Who can you trust, who’s telling you the truth. And how much energy has to be devoted to looking for the hidden agenda in your relationships with people.
I brought up the fact that she went from “Grease” right into the Xena musical episode. “The Bitter Suite.” During interviews before the play, she made a point of mentioning that one of the reasons she did it was to conquer a long fear of singing in public.
“What is it?” she thought to herself, obviously trying to put her feelings into words. “I don’t want it to sound too mawkish. I feel like it’s a real expression of my soul. So to put it up there for criticism is an extremely personal thing. If I go to sing somewhere, that is the most generous thing I can do because to me that is so vulnerable. Except that, if you’re famous, people think you’re invulnerable. It’s really shocking that there are people who have a vested interest in wanting to see you fail. For me to put myself up to expose myself like that is a really big deal.”