Holloway Pursuits
Liddy Holloway talks in depth about her many memorable appearances as Hercules’ legendary mother, Alcmene. Interview by K. Stoddard Hayes.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 10
As the mother of Hercules, New Zealand actress Liddy Holloway has gained international television fame. But it is only the latest accomplishment in her long career.
In her teens, Holloway attended the school of the Royal Festival Ballet in England, where she was trained as a dancer and actress. After returning to her native New Zealand, she began to work in the theatre while she was still pregnant with her second son, Joel Tobeck, who Hercules fans know as Strife and Deimos. She has played, she says, virtually every major female role in Shakespeare except for Lady Macbeth, an ambition she has yet to fulfill. She also made something of a speciality of playing ingenue roles in Noel Coward comedies, and has also appeared in a great many musical comedies. Television came later, with roles in Australian and New Zealand telemovies and series, including the long running New Zealand soap Shortland Street.
Holloway also has another successful career, as a television writer. “I've written for television since the late 1970s in Australia and here,” she reveals. “One-off dramas, series, soap operas, documentaries, short films - anything that's going. I raised Joel by my writing because he and I were alone for a long time, and it really was our bread and butter. I devised drama series here and worked as an editor and a storyliner. For the last couple of decades, most of my income has come from writing.”
Like other New Zealand actors who have filled guest roles on Xena and Hercules, Holloway already knew many of the people she would work with on the Hercules set. Indeed, these friends were one of the main reasons she took the role. “I auditioned for a film and I auditioned for this role, and I got both parts, so I had to choose,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘I really want to do Hercules. It does look like fun, and my friends are all working on it and having a lot of fun.’ So I went with this job. It was a lot of fun, and I think the film went nowhere, so I'm sure I made the right choice.”
For a New Zealand actor, coming on set is like a family reunion every time. “I go onto the set and it's ‘hello, how are you?’, kissy, kissy to the crew because we've all worked together for a thousand years,” says Holloway. “And sometimes it's the second generation. I've grown up in the industry with the fathers and mothers, and now it’s their children and young adults on the set and acting. It’s very nice.”
It was a special treat for Holloway to be paired with Jeffrey Thomas as Jason. “We’ve been very close friends for a very, very long time," she says, “and we know each other so well. It was a joy to work with him. We had a lot of fun. It was very nice to get married together on screen and it was such a beautiful place.”
Holloway stepped into a role which had been played by two previous actresses, Jennifer Ludlam in the telefilms and Elizabeth Hawthorne in the first season. In order to make the role her own, she modelled Alcmene at least partly on the mothers played by June Allyson and June Lockhart nearly 40 years earlier. She thought the character was written as “a perfect American apple pie mom.” But she also knew there was more to Alcmene than that.
“I figured, if she was up to [having sex with] Zeus then she had to be pretty feisty in some ways,” she comments. “That's why I was always after them to let me do something physical, because she may be the perfect Roman matron in some ways, but if she’s up to having sex with Zeus, she had to be a pretty strong girl in my book! A lesser mortal might have exploded!”
Holloway has somewhat mixed feelings about playing someone's mother. “It’s the same here as it is in America for women over 45. It’s very hard to find work. It’s something we all have to face. It's okay for guys to get older but not for women to grow older. In reality I was only 10 years older than Kevin Sorbo, and I was playing his mom!”
She quickly discovered that playing the mother of a man only a few years younger than herself has its pitfalls, particularly if the son looks like Kevin Sorbo. “My mother used to watch in America, and after my first episode she rang me and said, ‘Liddy, you’ve got to stop looking at his bosoms.’ I was eyeball to eyeball with his nipples, and of course, he's a gorgeous man. I said, ‘Oh god, I hope you’re the only one who noticed that!’”
Holloway’s first important Hercules episode was The Mother of All Monsters, in which Alcmene falls in love, is jilted, sees her son shot, and is kidnapped and attacked by the monster Echidna. “That was a nightmare!” she reveals. “There was so much physical stuff. Just the fights and being tied up and thrown in the back of the van about 20 times and falling on your elbow on the same place 20 times; being tied up and careening down a hill with wild horses, and thinking, ‘If this thing goes over, my hands are tied. I’ll die,’ “But that’s actually the challenge I love,” she adds. “I was forever trying to get them to let me be stunt mother. I was always saying, ‘Can I do that?’”
Indeed, some of Holloway’s favourite memories involve her action scenes. “In one episode [The Wedding of Alcmene] I had to do a physical stunt with a young stuntman. Of course he did it all; I just hung on! But it looked like I threw him down a cliff. We were filming up on this volcano and it's all grass, but it’s on the edge of the crater. So we were doing our little stunt, but our feet slipped on the grass on this one take, and we both disappeared from view and rolled down into this crater! We were laughing so much. I heard this absolute silence up above, and I could imagine them all going, ‘Oh, shit! They’re dead!’ There was this frozen silence until we both crawled our way up the grassy bank and appeared over the rim of the crater again. It was hysterical.”
Sometimes asking, “Can I do that?” led to more excitement than Holloway bargained for. In a memorable scene in Not Fade Away, Jason and Alcmene are trapped in a ring of fire. “That was really scary. We really overcame something personal to do that,” she recalls. “[The special effects director] set up this very complicated fire deal, with little jets of fire all around the place, and he had many people working for him. We had to walk it through many times before we even did the first take. They took every precaution. Of course, I’m wearing nylon, and I have nylon hair, which every time I turned fluffed out around me, and there’s flames everywhere! I would have gone poof, like a celluloid doll!”
Porkules presented a different challenge for Holloway. Working with a pig as a co-star is, according to the actress, very difficult. “They’re very neurotic,” she laughs. “I really felt sorry for the pig wrangler. He had a whole bunch of [piglets] all with their little outfits on, but he'd only had six weeks to train them and he needed a lot longer. I had to hold one in my lap in one scene, and we did this scene several times because as soon as they called ‘Action!’ the pig must have felt my adrenalin notch up a tad. It would get very, very agitated and stamp its little footies. My thighs were black and blue, I have to tell you! And they’re so stiff! I never knew how stiff a pig was. They get very, very agitated and squeak, and they’re so strong and stubborn!”
Holloway’s own experiences with stunt work made her appreciate the efforts of her television son. “I was always in absolute awe of Kevin Sorbo,” she enthuses, “who could read a couple of pages of moves for a really complicated fight scene and get in there and do this extremely complex choreography with 15 stuntees. And he'd learn it so fast that it just stunned me.”
Scenes that Holloway shared with Sorbo and Michael Hurst, another old friend and colleague, are among her favourites. “We’d just laugh, because they would improvise and I'd just have to hang in there and keep up a little bit. I loved that, because you have to be very alert and on your feet. It wasn’t like driving the plot; we were just doing a little riff of some sort. They would often be Kevin’s suggestions, little light family moments that often weren't even scripted. He didn't mind making Hercules look a little bit of a klutz around his mother, which I always thought was very sweet and really endearing, and I'm sure the audience loved it.”
Alcmene’s finest dramatic hour comes in the episode Twilight, when Hercules must accept that his mother is dying. For Holloway, that was the most emotionally satisfying of all her episodes. “I loved that episode because he and I had some good juicy emotional stuff to do and as an actress I like to do that. That scene when I was dying, Kevin was sitting then sobbing. He was so wonderful. He cried a lot.
Asked why she thinks none of Sorbo’s crying made the final cut, she speculates, “Maybe they thought it would make him look too vulnerable. But I tell you what, he was right there. It was a moment in time ant a tiny scene, but for us it was very emotional.”
Although Holloway wouldn’t mind playing Alcmene again, at the moment her life is going in some exciting new directions. She is a practising Tibetan Buddhist, a faith which has been growing rapidly in New Zealand. Her travels to Nepal, India and Tibet to visit holy places and study under Tibetat lamas have led to her launching a new career as an importer of pashmina shawls and other fine goods from Nepal. She is enjoying the new venture, especially the opportunities to travel back and forth to Nepal, which she describes as “physically exhausting but fantastic,” adding, “It’s a part of the world I love so much!” She is still finding work as an actress and writer, but enjoys having something to do other than wait for the phone to ring.
“I’ve been doing it for so long now, if it comes it’s fabulous, and if it doesn't that’s fabulous too,” she says, “which is a really lovely way to be. I spent many decades biting my nails, and going, ‘Oh god, where’s the work?’ I was very ambitious. And I still have my career, but I have had fantastic roles over the years which I would never have played in any other country, because this is a small country.
“I just like to work. I love to be creative, and don’t really mind what form it takes. I can be creative doing all kinds of things.”
SIDEBAR: Mother of Strife
Liddy Holloway is not only the mother of Hercules, but also the real world mother of Strife, Deimos and the arch-villain of Cleopatra 2525, Creegan. All are played by her son, Joel Tobeck, and she has plenty to say about him.
On the start of his career:
“Joel had no choice, really. He was around the theatre from the moment he was conceived. He was literally in a basket backstage while mummy was on stage, from a brand new baby. So his whole life was around theatre. Then he worked as an usher when he was a young adolescent in the big theatres. All my friends were his family. He grew up watching people perform every night of his life, so no wonder that's what he's doing.”
On his convention appearances:
“Joel's done a lot of them and he's very good on the end of a microphone. He gets on the microphone and entertains a few thousand people for 25 minutes and doesn’t think twice about it. He did a lot of stand-up comedy when he was younger too. He’s very good at that, although he finds it very tiring.”
On his performance as Strife:
“Isn’t he funny! I hadn't seen any of Strife, because they haven't shown it down here, and I watched a tape and said, I’m surprised Jim Carrey hasn't sued you!’
“I’m sorry I never got to work with Joel. It would have been fun. He comes home exhausted. When I saw these tapes, I said, Joel, no wonder you’re exhausted, flying through the air and hung upside down.' His performance is so hard in terms of energy. They were always saying, ‘More, more, more!’ They never asked Alcmene, ‘Give us more, more, more!’”