Mesure of a Man
While Charles Mesure will always be best remembered for his portrayal of the Archangel Michael in Xena’s latter two seasons, he’s appeared as a number of different characters during Xena’s six-year run.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 21
“My first appearance was as Mercer in The Price,” he recalls when Xena Magazine catches up with him on the set of Street Legal, his current show. “I had just finished a season of City Life, and the day I finished that show I went straight on to Xena!”
There isn’t really a huge pool of actors out here in New Zealand,” Mesure explains, “so Renaissance Pictures knows who is around and I was asked along for an audition. It was my first audition for them and they got me to read for four different roles. One was for an older, general kind of guy, and the other was a young, scared soldier who was at his wits end because he was surrounded by these Horde warriors.
“But there were also two brothers in the episode. One was sensible while the other was crazy and aggressive. In the end I was cast as the older, sensible brother, and I wasn’t complaining, because it was the biggest part!”
Mesure soon learned of an important rule which every guest character on the show had to adhere to. “One of the basic premises for every role you play on Xena is that no matter how big and tough your character is, Xena and Gabrielle are always bigger and tougher than you,” he explains. “Mercer is this Athenian general who is a trained warrior and a professional armed combat expert. But you have to make out that Xena knows more than you, that you’re dumber than her and that she’s a better fighter than you.”
The role of Mercer was followed just a few months later by the part of Darnell in The Dirty Half Dozen. “I describe him as the sexy, cowboy-gladiator type,” Measure says of the villainous character, a warlord worshipper of Ares who butts heads with Xena and Gabrielle.
“While I’ve done another couple of other little things on the shows, most of my appearances apart from that have been as Michael,” Mesure adds. Those other little things include a walk-on part in the Hercules: The Legendary Journeys episode Yes, Virginia, There is a Hercules.
Turning to Michael, Mesure reveals that he had no idea the archangel would be a recurring character following a brief appearance in Hercules and his first Xena appearance in the season five opener Fallen Angel. “At the time, we had no idea what was going to happen with him,” Mesure recalls. “I knew that his first appearance would be as a nice big bad guy. And then they decided to wheel him out again on Xena.”
Mesure acquainted himself with the biblical archangel Michael in order to be better able to embody the role. “I did a little research into his history, and there were a few characteristics that we were able to use, including that he’s an archangel, which is a warrior caste. We also seized on a cunning trait in his character that the other angels didn’t have. But there is only so much you can do. Xena stories are very simple, and the characters tend to be very simple as well. All the values that you need to play those characters tend to come from the script, so it’s difficult to bring in elements that aren’t already written in.”
Special effects were an important key to bringing the character to the screen in a believable way. “Every time I played Michael there would be blue screen work involved,” Mesure says. “There was a lot of flying in Fallen Angel. We were up in the air almost every day for that one! Half of it was blue screen work and CGI, while the other half was done with harnesses. The tricky stuff was the flying where we had to use harnesses. Michael and all the other angels had to wear a wing harness, which is a very uncomfortable piece of equipment. Then, underneath that, we had to wear a flying harness, which is also incredibly uncomfortable. So when you put them both together, it could be a very long day!
“The whole thing felt a bit like one big practical joke,” he notes good-humouredly. “You’ve got these big, wide wings on your back weighing 15 kilograms, and you spend half your time trying not to fall over backwards during stunts and fights! You have to look like this cool, angelic warrior guy. So it’s incredibly hard work. And after eight hours in the wing and flying harnesses I would usually have sweated off a couple of kilos. By then, I would also be fairly tired and grumpy!”
Unfortunately, according to Mesure, the sweat and tears which had gone into these scenes would often not be obvious to the audience. “It’s a shame,” he says, “because when you see the finished episode you only get to see us descending into frame for the final drop of two feet or so. You don’t see that we’re 30 feet off the ground before we start, so half of the effect is lost.”
Despite the discomfort during the shooting of those scenes, however, Mesure admits the harness shots he had to do for several episodes were an interesting experience for him as an actor. “Every time we did one, we’d find out more about how to sell the characters and how to do all that stuff,” he says, “so they were a real learning curve.”
Fortunately for Mesure, not as much special effects work was required for his appearance in later episodes such as Heart of Darkness. “All the recent blue screen work has mostly just been Michael standing on his heavenly cliff looking heroically down upon the mortals below,” he explains. “That was a lot easier than the first batch of episodes we did.”
Mesure regrets not having had the opportunity to broaden Michael’s character in further episodes. “I would have liked to have done more comedy,” he reveals. Michael does make an appearance in the recently aired comedy episode You Are There, however. “Every time I go out and do another Xena, it’s as if the boundaries have been pushed back a little bit further,” he says, referring to the episode’s offbeat storyline. “When we did the episode it was just like a completely different show. It was really breaking out of the Xena universe. And Michael Hurst is a fantastic comedian.”
To appear in the episode, Mesure was fortunate to be able to take time off from his current show, Street Legal, in which he co-stars with fellow Xena guest star Jay (Draco) Laga’aia. “I’ve been shooting Street Legal every day since November,” he reveals, “so my agent requested they let me off for just a couple of days here and there so I could go and do some Xena.”
Like so many of his fellow guest actors on Xena, Mesure has nothing but admiration for the show’s leading ladies. “Lucy [Lawless] and Renee [O’Connor] are both really good actresses,” he enthuses. “You don’t always get to work with really good people in television. Often you’re working with people who are cast because they look a certain way or whatever. But Lucy and Renee can just do everything at the very highest level, which is one of the fantastic things about the whole experience. Having been doing Xena every year for the last five years now, I’ve seen how much they have developed. For instance, you can see just how much more powerful, confident and skilled Lucy gets with every season.”
Of all his roles on Xena and Hercules, surprisingly, it is not Michael that Mesure picks out as his favourite but Darnell. “I prefer to play bad guy characters,” he explains. “Darnell was the most enjoyable role I have ever taken on. He was the most sexist, treacherous, violent… He was all those crazy things, but at the same time he was a hoot to play.
“But having said that, Michael is great as well,” he acknowledges. “He started off as this pious guy who wasn’t very much fun. But in the stuff we’ve done recently, you’ve seen that he has a dark side, and this aspect has really taken off. The character I’m playing on Street Legal at the moment is the bad guy, while Jay Laga’aia is the ‘good guy’ defence lawyer. His job is to get the criminals off, while mine is to put them in jail where they belong.”
Is there a specific role on Xena or Hercules that Mesure would have liked to play, were he given the chance? “Ares,” he responds without hesitation. “That would have been a bit of a laugh! When I did Darnell, I just played him with a really bad Kevin Smith impression. I saw that Kevin was having a good time playing Ares, and I thought, ‘I want a piece of that action!’”
Going back to his acting roots, Mesure reveals that his early career gave him some good grounding for his current role in Street Legal. “When I went to university I was going to be a lawyer,” he recalls, “but the more I got into it, the more I realised it wasn’t me. I started to spend more and more time horsing around doing plays, designing plays and meeting girls doing plays! It was just a social thing at the time, but I wasn’t getting any younger, so I decided that I should take it seriously, and I really just fell into it. It wasn’t a great passion, but it became something to do.
“There are no other members of my family in the profession,” he says. “They’re all anti-theatre people. My dad is an academic and a businessman, my sister’s a doctor, and no one else has anything to do with the theatre or the performing arts whatsoever. So I’m like the black sheep of the family!
“I finished law school in 1992 and auditioned for drama school in Australia,” he continues. “I went to the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney and spent three years there. Then, within a couple of months or so of gaining a degree and leaving, I was cast in City Life, which I did for a year. For the first day of my first acting job I was on location playing a gay character who had to kiss the character Kevin Smith was playing! It was a funny way to start.
“I’ve been in New Zealand ever since,” Mesure explains. “I always said I would go back to Australia when the work dried up, but I’ve been working flat out here for the last five years. The Xena and Hercules people have been wonderful to me, so it’s been a great place to be.
“There’s a lot of unemployment wherever you go as an actor, but in New Zealand I’ve found that the ratio of jobs to actors going for them is favourable. There’s much less work going here than in Australia, England or wherever, but there are far, far fewer actors going for them. So when they need a big lumpy-looking actor out here there are about a dozen people they can hire - Kevin Smith, myself or about 10 other people!”
It’s not surprising, therefore, that Mesure has come across Xena regulars such as Kevin Smith time and time again. “On every show that I’ve worked on I’ve come across people who have worked on Xena and Hercules,” he says.
Mesure is keen to stress that New Zealand would not have attained its reputation for quality film and television-making had it not been for Renaissance Pictures. “The whole skill-base in New Zealand and virtually every area of the industry has risen because those shows have been here,” he acknowledges. “They have been an absolute gift to us. If we hadn’t had Xena and Hercules then we wouldn’t be shooting Lord of the Rings in Wellington at the moment, because the skill-base just wouldn’t be available.
“So they have actually been a godsend, and we are really going to miss Xena. The show has been an absolute lifeblood to my profession. It’s fantastic and has been invaluable to us. It’s fun to do, and it allows you to earn a living.
“With luck and a following wind, we’ll find something else to put in its place.”