Sky’s The Limit
She went from playing a feisty female with attitude to a dizzy blond thrown into a future world beset by terrifying robots, and she has many more credits to her name. Jennifer Sky tells us what it takes to play two very different roles in two very different series from Renaissance Pictures.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 15
“500 years into the future, she will enter a world where machines rule the earth…”
So begin the opening lines of Pacific Renaissance’s science fiction series Cleopatra 2525. While in the series, 21st Century actress Cleopatra wakes up from cryogenic sleep into a world of terror, her real-life alter ego is a 21st Century actress who’s just having a ball.
Before kicking butt as Cleopatra, Jennifer Sky was known to most fans for kicking butt as Amarice, the fiery young Amazon in Xena: Warrior Princess.
At the time that auditions were being held in Los Angeles for the role of Amarice, Sky was attending the Sundance Film Festival in Utah for the showing of her independent film Trigger Happy. She received the call informing her of the audition for Amarice, and was more than willing to fly back and take part.
Despite not knowing a great deal about Xena at that point, Sky was certainly aware of the popularity of the series and intrigued by the idea of travelling to New Zealand. “I decided I’d love to see the country,” Sky recalls, “and I thought it would be really great to go there and play something really wild, like one of the Amazons.”
Several callbacks later, Sky was off to New Zealand to film her first two Xena episodes as Amarice. “I really didn’t have that much of an idea about Xena or about the Amazons,” she says, “it was all a bit over my head at the time. But it sounded really cool.
“They told me that I was definitely going to be doing two episodes,” she says of her initial trip. Those two episodes were the fourth season shows Endgame and Ides of March. “I remember when I finished those, I was crying when I went back to get the plane, thinking, ‘Oh that’s it, I’ll never be here again!’ At the time, it seemed like a really big deal. I had all my friends seeing me off at the airport; we were all crying and they were all waving from the balcony. I was being an actor, and being really dramatic... it was very funny. But then three weeks later, I was back. I had no idea what I was getting myself into!”
Sky didn’t know it at the time, but the producers of Xena were looking to introduce a young semi-regular character that would appeal to the younger audience and give them someone closer to their age to relate to. They kept bringing Sky back in one and two-episode blocks, until Animal Attraction, when Amarice was written in for at least another four episodes. For Sky, only one of these last four - Them Bones, Them Bones - eventually happened. “Something else came up,” Sky says, smiling, “and kept me from doing those other three.”
That something else, of course, was Cleopatra 2525.
Sky had heard about the series while in New Zealand filming Xena, and remembers thinking that it would be “really fun to do a space-age Xena.”
Only just back in the US for more auditions, Sky received an early-morning audition call for the title role of Cleopatra. “Rob [Tapert] was there at the audition and I’d just seen him a few hours before, in New Zealand. I said to him, ‘I’m jet-lagged. I’m not going to be able to do a good job.’ But I guess I did!”
She went through the audition for Cleo just like any other hopeful, but with the added advantage that Rob Tapert and company had first-hand familiarity with her abilities as an actor. At first, Sky didn’t think her experience as Amarice would be that influential in the casting decision for the role in Cleo. She thought initially that the producers wouldn't “see me in the part of Cleopatra, because it was so different from Amarice. Amarice was the strong, feisty one.”
However, she admits that the introduction of a lighter side of Amarice had definitely worked in her favour. “Up until Animal Attraction, I’d done all these really heavy episodes, with all this trauma like when Xena and Gabrielle were dead. Animal Attraction was the first episode that was light and comedic. I had seen R.J. [Stewart, producer and writer on Xena] before I’d shot it, and he’d said, ‘You know Jennifer, you’re a really charming and funny person; you should put some more of that into Amarice.’ So I did. I heard through the grapevine that the producers saw Animal Attraction and said, ‘Well, maybe we could see her as Cleopatra. She was great in this, so let’s see what else she can do.’ I guess everything’s meant to be.”
Being thrown into a world 500 years in the future might have been tough for Cleopatra, but Sky says that initially it was even tougher for her as an actor, having to play a character who didn’t know anything about what was going on around her. “At the start of the series she was basically just in terror all the time,” Sky says of Cleopatra. “She learns along the way, but it’s still not her world. It wasn’t easy to seem like I didn’t know anything.”
But while Cleo slowly learned the tricks of the trade in the fictional world, Sky learned her own tricks as well, including how to make Cleo an important element of the threesome consisting of her, Hel (Gina Torres) and Sarge (Victoria Pratt). “Cleo’s the fish out of water,” Sky notes. “She always will be. She never really acclimatises to the environment; but that’s what makes the trio so good.”
The three staunch warriors in Cleo are all equally powerful, bringing unique and individual talents to the group, both as characters and as actors. What stands out for Sky as Cleopatra, for example, are the quirks and traits that make the character more accessible to the young people of our century. “Cleo herself is still in this odd world,” she says. “She’s accepted it the way it is, but she doesn’t feel the need to change herself. She still likes her fashion and she still likes to look pretty, even though it’s not really necessary. That’s one of the things that I think Hel and Sarge really liked about her - that she was obviously different.”
Sky also recognises another trait that is important in the world which Cleo now inhabits. “She’s not got the strength or ability that Sarge and Hel have as warriors,” she explains, “but she has a lot of courage.” The three characters do have certain similarities, however. “At the start, we were all like orphans,” she counters, “trying to find our way - just like Amarice.”
There may be a number of differences between the ancient and futuristic worlds that Sky’s two different characters have inhabited, but there are also some similarities between the two series. “Both Xena and Cleo are dark shows,” Sky points out. “When Xena films inside, they always use low lighting, and the underworld on Cleo is also a dark place. But the sets and environments are all different, and of course the costumes."
There’s also another major difference between Xena and Cleo, one that most audiences wouldn’t even think of. “This is going to sound really funny,” says Sky, “but the smell is different! On Xena, they use a lot of frankincense, a very potent incense, to create the atmosphere. On Cleo, we use dry ice machines and pyrotechnics, which have a very different smell. Things are different in those ways, but of course the filming is just as high quality on both shows. We have that really gorgeous film look in both Cleo and Xena, where a lot of the colours are really cinematically appealing and beautiful.”
Comparing experiences on Xena and Cleo is no easy task, but Sky can certainly pick examples of why she’s enjoyed her time with Pacific Renaissance as much as she has. “I really loved my first Xena episode Endgame,” she says, “because that was my first time working with Lucy and Renee. I loved doing Animal Attraction, too, because I liked working with Ted Raimi. I think he`s a really amazing actor and I think I actually learned a lot from him as a comedian. Sometimes he would be doing a fight scene or something, and I’d really be paying attention. I’d sit behind the video monitor during his scene and watch, and I’d just laugh and laugh because he was so funny. So Animal Attraction was really my favourite Xena episode to work on because it was a comedy.”
“And working on Xena - I mean really, as a woman - and as an actor - where can you get to play an Amazon? With Amarice I went through that journey of her emotional coming of age, her fight scenes, her discovery of herself… So playing Amarice was great!”
It’s no wonder, then, that Sky enjoys the feisty character of Cleopatra just as much, even if it does mean a little more work. “I’ve worked a lot harder on Cleo than I did on Xena,” she admits, “but that’s because on Xena I was a guest actor and on Cleo I’m one of the leads. I think Cleo is a little more high energy; the pace is continual, just like the stories. Xena seems more emotional in a way, whereas Cleo is lighter but higher in energy.”
So which have been her favorite episodes of Cleopatra 2525? “Run Cleo Run was challenging physically because it was a lot of running and panting,” she reveals, “and doing Double was really cool because that was me playing to myself. Although it wasn’t really to myself, because it was a body double!”
However, Sky is unable to pick a single favourite Cleo moment, especially as the show has allowed her to flex her acting muscles in so many different ways. “I’ve had to strip and dance and sing and fight and shoot things and run through places and imagine scary monsters,” she laughs. “I’ve done almost everything you can possibly imagine as an actor in this situation. I’ve run the gamut. Working on Cleo is just so different and cool!”
Sky credits Xena and Cleo as having been instrumental in her development as an actor. “Over this past year and a half,” she says, “I’ve found that the best thing I can bring to my roles is comedy. In a way, through working on Xena and Cleo, I’ve found myself as an actor. These shows have been challenging in many ways.” Sky pauses and revises that last sentence. “Actually, they’ve been challenging in every way.”
So how much of a challenge was it to play female characters who can be seen as powerful role models for our time? “I think it’s really great that they’re writing these kinds of strong characters for women,” Sky acknowledges. “There was Wonder Woman in the 1970s and 1980s, and Lucy Lawless is one of the first to come along in this generation. It’s really exciting for me that we’re riding this wave, that the world is opening up its consciousness to this kind of model of the very powerful female.”
That’s not how Sky sees herself, though. “I see myself as a normal girl,” she says, “with a cool job. You know, sometimes I feel like I just do it for the fun of it. I just have such a good time with my job. I want to thank all the show’s fans for keeping on watching,” she smiles. “We love ya!”
It hasn’t always been swords and science fiction; one of Sky’s first acting jobs was as a series regular on the successful US soap General Hospital. This, she says, is a far cry from the action roles she has had in recent years. “It’s a completely different medium,” she explains of a soap opera versus an action series like Xena or Cleo. “It’s like film acting and stage acting. It’s the way you technically go about doing a soap, compared with the way you technically go about doing action. Every series has a different speed and a different pace; even though they both happen to be television, they’re totally opposite. Technically, General Hospital was challenging for me, but not enough, and not in the ways I wanted it to be.”
Ask any fan of television science fiction, fantasy or action, and they can probably recall The Pack, one of the more memorable episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In this particular episode, Sky played one of the group of students at Buffy’s Sunnydale High School who are temporarily possessed by hyenas, a role she describes as a “funky little part.”
Research for the role involved watching a video of hyenas to study their sounds and behaviour. Behaviour was especially important as, during the episode, the possessed pack show their true animal natures by devouring first the school’s pig mascot, Herbert, and then the school’s principal, both with equal relish. Sky’s only line in the episode was a deliciously evil “Crunchy!”, referring to their devouring of Herbert the pig. It was Sky’s first taste - so to speak - of an action role.
“It was really fun,” she admits, “and pretty easy to go to that place. I didn’t really know it at the time, but that’s exactly what Amarice was - just a wild creature, running around in the woods.” Suddenly Sky gets a mischievous glimmer in her eyes, a mixture of Amarice, Cleopatra and a student possessed by a hyena. “There’s a little bit of animal in everybody,” she says with relish.
So does this mean Sky wants to keep up with the action roles? The answer is an emphatic “Yes! I need something that’s a little bit insanity-based. Like myself!”