Queen Victoria
She's most recently been seen as ultra-fit freedom fighter Sarge in Cleopatra 2525, but Xena fans will know Victoria Pratt best for her portrayal of the fiery Amazon Queen Cyane in the two-part adventure Adventures in the Sin Trade. Kate Barker muscles in for a chat with the fitness guru and accomplished actress.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 17
“The thing I like about Sarge is that she's a wild card,” says Victoria Pratt. “She's angry; she's a man-eater. She'll do or say anything... and I like the fact that she's able to do that.”
Pratt is referring, of course, to her most recent alter-ego: the gutsy, hard-nosed freedom fighter and one of the three leading ladies out to save the world in Cleopatra 2525.
Actually, parts of Pratt's description of Sarge are not so far removed from the actress herself, especially the part about being able to do anything. At a young age, it was sports and fitness that took the lead in Pratt’s life. From her early years at grade school to graduating high school and moving on to university, Pratt excelled in soccer and track events. This led to several prizes including a medal at the Canadian Track and Field Championships in 1990.
Pratt’s interests went a little left field when she graduated from York University with an honours degree in Kinesiology, and went to work at its Human Performance Lab, testing the workings of professional athletes. Testing wasn’t the same as doing, however, and eventually Pratt turned down a university scholarship in physiotherapy to resume her pursuit of action and adventure.
First came a book on fitness and bodybuilding, which led to contracts as both a fitness writer and model. The publisher of fitness magazines Muscle-Mag and Oxygen, for whom she was working, then convinced her to take things further and study acting. “I started acting classes because my publisher said that one day I’d regret it if I didn’t,” remembers Pratt. “It took me a couple of years to actually muster up enough courage to go and get an agent. I was incredibly lucky that the first audition I went to led to a series.”
The series in question was Go For It!, which focused on action-adventure sports. Pratt became the show’s on-air trainer, teaching the series’ hosts how to get into physical shape before tackling each week’s experience. Then came another on-air fitness programme, Personal Edge, and several fitness videos, such as Karatics: The Ultimate Workout, with US kick-boxing and karate champion Robert Fletcher.
It was around this time that Pratt’s acting skills were about to really come to the fore. Only two days after signing on with a Toronto talent agent, she was cast in her debut acting role as mob boss Jackie Janszik in The Jackie Janszik Files, aired as a television movie as part of John Woo’s Once a Thief. Eventually, Once a Thief finished its run, and it just happened that at about that time, Xena producer Rob Taper! was on the hunt for someone to play Cyane the Amazon Queen in the season four opener Adventures in the Sin Trade. “When my series in Canada got cancelled, I thought, forget this, I’m moving!” Pratt recalls. “I went to the States and got an audition for Xena. It was a standard audition, and I went through the regular channels for it in the same way as any other actor in LA.”
In Adventures in the Sin Trade, Cyane is the queen of a tribe of Amazons caught in limbo after Xena inadvertently lets them be slaughtered. Throughout the story, the overlying feeling of Cyane and the rest of the tribe is one of hopelessness and defeat, a motivation that Pratt wasn’t used to playing. Sin Trade was a double episode, filmed in sometimes not-so-nice conditions, as the cast and crew were on location for much of the shoot. Even so, Pratt insists she had a wonderful time. “The highlight was being able to come down to New Zealand itself,” she says. “I’d never been to New Zealand before, and I had no idea what to expect.
“It was winter,” she recalls, “and we were on top of this volcano. It was really cold! My face got cold and I could hardly talk anymore, and my eyes were watering because of the wind. At one point, our base camp actually blew away! The day after we left, the entire road got washed away by a flood because the weather was so wild. I’d never filmed under such wild conditions before; it was really full-on!”
Pratt is clearly enjoying telling the tale, and goes on to counteract the “wild” conditions with the enjoyment of being on a location shoot like this. “The fact that we got to travel really helped make it a great episode,” she says enthusiastically. “We went and filmed in Taupo [a town about five hours’ drive from Auckland], which was incredible. We had the whole crew relocated and stayed at this little fisherman’s lodge. Taupo has this big fresh-water lake, and my dad’s a trout fisherman, so it reminded me of Canada and I thought of my dad the whole time. That’s probably the real highlight, getting down to Taupo; it was just so much fun.”
Following Xena, more and more auditions started to come Pratt’s way. One of them was for a new series by the makers of Xena called Cleopatra 2525. “I went and read for it,” explains Pratt, “but I was still under contract with Aaron Spelling for a movie called Forbidden Island, which was also filming in New Zealand. I was offered a role in another movie [a sequel to the film Strange Brew] on the morning that I got offered the role in Cleo.”
It all sounds very confusing, especially since the situation almost led to Pratt missing out on playing Sarge. “I had to say to Renaissance, ‘I'm sorry; I’ve already promised to do this movie in Canada.’ I went up to Toronto and went into rehearsal, and we had two days before we were going to start filming.” But, as luck would have it, funding on the film fell through, leaving Pratt able to pursue the part of Sarge. “The movie was off, just like that,” she recalls. “I called my agent in LA and said, ‘It's fallen apart. Have they cast Sarge yet?’ As it happened, they hadn’t found anyone, so I said, ‘Guess what - I’m free!’ I was on the plane in a couple of days.”
What was ironic, as Pratt was soon to find out, was that when it had come to casting Sarge, Tapert actually said he’d wanted a “Vicky Pratt-type” for the part. Luckily for Pratt, this was a role which she was perfectly suited for.
Pratt’s passion for adventure and action - and the moves that go with them - is certainly a great asset to bring to the gung-ho character of Sarge. After all, with a blue belt in Shotokan karate and a personal favourite exercise of kick-boxing, it’s not surprising that Pratt really did have the character of Sarge tailor-made just for her.
Like Gina Torres [Hel], Pratt does most of her own stunt work on Cleopatra 2525. “We’ve had our share of-injuries,” she admits, “but we’ve never had anything serious happen. We’ve got great stunt people, and when something’s too dangerous for us, they get the stunt people in. But whatever we can do, we do.”
“I just finished this great episode, and everybody’s really excited about the fight scene. We were in this totally round room and we had to seal off a door. I was in this harness with one connecting point, really close to the ground. I was in a fight with another fellow and there was a big chase. We were running around the room, parallel to the floor, then changing direction and doing hand springs over one another… and they’d suspended the cameraman from the ceiling on a bungy! It cut together really well.”
“It’s so gratifying when you get to do your own stunts like that, because when you see the finished product, you think, ‘I can’t believe I did that! It’s so neat - I love it!’”
Apart from the stunts and the action - and of course the ancient world versus the future - Pratt offers an insight into the more subtle differences between Xena and Cleopatra 2525. “The two shows are a lot alike, but there are quite a few differences that people might not think about straight away,” she points out, “like costumes, for instance. Apart from the way they look, in Xena the costumes were all natural fibres, like leather. In Cleo, they're all synthetic. We pay for that when it's hot!”
The biggest difference, adds Pratt, is the basic premise of each series and its own little universe. “Xena is usually man against man or man against god, but on Cleo it’s man against machine. I think it’s maybe more often a serious tone on the Xena set, because it’s that kind of show. Cleo has some dark episodes, but the atmosphere on set…” Pratt pauses, trying to find the best way to describe the lightheartedness that prevails on the Cleopatra 2525 set. “We’re laughing and cackling and acting like a bunch of maniacs, and the crew just goes off with us. Sometimes you would wonder what the hell we were doing in there. Every show takes on the mood of the people in it, so this is a goofy set!”
But they’re serious characters, right? After all, they're battling to regain their world. That’s true, says Pratt, certainly in terms of what’s happening for the characters. Naturally, the actress has developed something of an insight into fellow freedom fighters Hel and Cleopatra [Jennifer Sky], as well as her own alter ego. “Each character is quite different,” she says, describing the three leads. “Cleo’s been unfrozen from another time. Hel has spent all her life underground. But Sarge was born on the surface; she left her family and her community to go underground, and did what she could to survive. Sarge has a bit of darkness to her, definitely.”
An example of this can be seen in Quest For Firepower, the opening episode of Cleopatra 2525. “We don't need windows here,” she tells Cleo sharply, and there’s just a hint of wistfulness. “We live underground.”
As the series has gone on, Sarge has mellowed somewhat from the original concept of a human howitzer. “When they unfroze Cleo,” says Pratt of the events in Cleopatra 2525’s opening episode, “Sarge didn’t want to bring her along. Sarge thought, ‘Cleo has flaws; she can’t shoot. How can she possibly help us?’ It was a logical thing, in that Sarge thought Cleo would be a hindrance rather than a help. But I think Sarge has slowly developed a soft spot for Cleo and she sees her as part of the team. Sarge has softened a bit, and I think that’s mainly because people want to see humanity in their heroes.”
People want to see comedy, too; from the very first episode, Sarge has been trying to use her feminine wiles to seduce Mauser, the android who provides a lot of the technology the freedom fighters use in their quest. “Down girl,” Sarge advises Cleo, who is impressed with Mauser’s ‘accessories’. “He’s an android, not even programmed for sex.”
Something else which is popular with fans of Renaissance Pictures' series is the way women are portrayed with such internal strength and fortitude in the face of adversity. Pratt knows this well; the fans tell her personally. “I get a lot of mail,” she says, “and most of it’s from mothers wanting to thank me for giving their daughter or niece or sister or even them something else to look at and to strive for. I think it’s important for young girls to see that, and if I can help, that’s great.”
Is this one of the reasons why shows like Xena and Cleopatra 2525 are such a success? Pratt says as much, but puts it more succinctly: “I do know that there’s nothing else like them on television.
“What we do with Cleo and the other series, given our limited time and money, is incredible,” Pratt explains. “When you see the finished product on television, it looks like we’ve spent a lot more time and money on the episodes than we actually have. I went and saw The Matrix and X-Men; these are fabulous movies and they spent millions of dollars and months and months on them. With some of Cleo’s episodes, we've had four days and certainly not millions of dollars, but our effects still look incredible.
“[Executive Producer] Rob Tapert says he likes to watch the show with the sound off because it’s so visually stunning, and I think that’s a big part of it too. I mean, you have three women kicking butt in these really small outfits, so there’s certainly a lot of eye candy! But there are all these prosthetics to create these mutants. Sometimes the make-up department come in at three in the morning to start work - always something new and great. I don’t know how they do it, I really don't!”
Of course, as Pratt points out, unlike series set in the past, Cleopatra 2525 has no problem with authenticity getting in the way of creativity. “Cleo is set 500 years into the future,” she reminds us. “The characters have limited access to weapons and technology, and there are the story points and history that has happened up to that point in time where the series starts. But it’s all about problem solving and using your imagination and asking ourselves, 'What if?’, because nobody knows.
“Nobody knows what it’s going to be like in 500 years’ time, or whether we’re going to be here at all. We could be underground; we could have destroyed the earth; we could have devices small enough to fit into our skimpy costumes! The nice thing about sci-fi is that anything goes. We can do anything we want to do, and that’s the fun of it.”
From soccer to sci-fi - it seem like quite a leap, but Pratt considers it a “natural progression” from action sports to action drama, albeit in quite a convoluted way, and thinks it’s great to be able to use one passion in tandem with another. Did she ever think her love of fitness would lead to a starring role as an action hero?
“No way!” she laughs. “You never in your wildest imagination would think you’d be doing something this cool!”