Thank You, Trebor
How many men would don a pink tutu and strip on stage in front of a tavern full of lecherous Greeks? Robert Trebor certainly would, and, not surprisingly, through such daring and hilarious moments has earned the love and respect of Xena and Hercules fans the world over. Paul Simpson and Ruth Thomas get down to business with the driving force behind everyone's favourite comedy conman, Salmoneus.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 18
“Salmoneus is a Chekovian character of deep manifest destiny - that’s how I see him, anyway,” says Robert Trebor with a totally straight face, surprising for a man who is renowned for his comedy performances. “I never thought of him as a comic character. I saw him with a deep inner life and a sense of struggle - a man who wasn’t a farmer or a fighter trying to get along in this cruel world of ours...”
Then the trademark Trebor grin lights up his face. “But I can understand how people might think he was a comedic character…”
Trebor is best known now for his portrayal of Salmoneus, the likeable but financially obsessed bumbler who first appeared alongside Hercules, and then became one of the many supporting players to cross over to Xena: Warrior Princess.
Like Bruce Campbell’s Hercules/Xena alter ego, Autolycus, the character of Salmoneus was introduced to the show to provide comic relief from the more serious subject matter of the shows, and Trebor admits that he enjoys making people laugh. “It’s how I got into theatre, back in elementary school,” he recalls. “I was doing some sort of godawful Christmas pantomime, and people started laughing when I came on stage! I had all my clothes on and buttoned up, so it wasn’t that! It was something about my personality and timing, and I guess people found it funny. I do enjoy seeing people laughing; better that they laugh with you than al you!”
Trebor has had plenty of experience of making people laugh since that first memorable acting experience. “I’ve appeared in Woody Allen films,” he reveals. “I’ve done quite a bit of comedy on stage - Neil Simon, Woody Allen plays - so comedy was my stock in trade.”
While Trebor accepts that Salmoneus is a comic character, he quickly comes to the defence of his alter ego when it’s suggested that he is, at heart, a conman. “I don’t really see him that way,” he says. “There are allusions to him being a conman in the period between the episodes, where I’ll talk about running a scam. But whenever you see Salmoneus operating in front of the camera, he’s not really running a con. So I don’t really see him as a conman, I think he’s just extremely lax about the fine print. He doesn’t read it too carefully - he’d just gloss over the fine print in service of the momentum of the deal.
“There are allusions to cons - he’s running a brothel; he’s helping with the Olympics... but he’ll be doing interesting, forward-thinking things that happen to make money, and then of course he has to lose the money because Hercules gives it to somebody else! So you never actually see him walking away with any money at the end of an episode. Hercules is always giving it to someone else, and Salmoneus’ jaw drops and I go, ‘I earned that!’”
Trebor drops into a very creditable Kevin Sorbo as Hercules impression: “‘Salmoneus, let’s talk about this!’ Much of Salmoneus’ energy goes into incurring Hercules’ goodwill and good opinion. He very much craves Hercules' good opinion of him, at least as much as making money in any of the episodes. “I don’t want to minimise his greed or lecherousness,” Trebor adds. “Those are standard, burlesque, comic vaudeville elements. He’s not a saint by any means, but I don't think Salmoneus was consciously a criminal, unlike Autolycus, who's a thief.”
Although Salmoneus normally came away from the episodes empty-handed, on one notable occasion he actually got the girl. “In the episode The Fire Down Below,” he admits, grinning at the memory. “She was a beautiful blonde. I’ve unwittingly stolen Hera’s antiquities and I’ve got all of these slaves, and all of them leave except for one, the prettiest. At the end we share a lovely kiss and go off together.”
It’s clear that Trebor enjoys playing the character - but what would he think of Salmoneus if he actually met him? “I would like him,” he says after a moment’s thought. “But I’d be a little wary. He'd be the guy who was trying to sell me something. I, as Robert Trebor, would ask him, ‘What do you mean, up to 500?’ He’s like a guy in Vegas: “You will get up to a million dollars.” Yes, but ‘up to’ means you could get just $1! If I met Sal - and I’ve met people like him in real life, trying to sell me insurance policies - I would say, ‘Now let’s get down to the bottom of what this language really means.’ I, as Robert Trebor, am a fairly canny consumer, and I don’t want to be defrauded.”
Ask Trebor what his best memories of working on the two shows are, and he thinks back to the 1994 TV movie Hercules and the Lost Kingdom, in which he played Waylin, a slave who fusses over Hercules. “During the take, I was improvising in the moment, and it really worked,” Trebor reminisces. “I was going, ‘I’m the perfect slave, I don’t want to be fired’. Kevin asked what I was doing, but the director said it was terrific, so I kept going!
“I worked for eight days, and then I toured the country for five or six days in a row. What a great way to work! I’d never been to New Zealand before, so I learned how to drive on the left-hand side of the road, and my girlfriend and I toured up and down the island. It was a whole new world.”
Trebor has no difficulty citing his most memorable appearance as Salmoneus. “I had to do a cartwheel in an open field filled with cow patties and muck, because our First AD got it wrong!” he recalls. “They said we were going to have a dry day, and it wasn’t, but we were already out on location and we couldn’t go back. We had to stay until some sort of sun came out, and I was required to do a cartwheel. So I think that was a challenge well met. If you look at the episode you can see it was really me doing the cartwheel. Plus I got to work with Cory Everson [Atlanta], which was great.
“I also loved working with Lucy [Lawless] for the first time in The Gauntlet,” Trebor continues. “I’m dressed as a woman, and she rips my disguise off, my beard comes out, and I start improvising. If you look at the shot where Lucy’s looking at me, you can see Lucy’s face going, ‘what the hell’s this guy doing?’
“It’s ironic,” he adds. “Some of the things I remember the most are the hardest days we had, but those were often the ones which turned out to be the funniest and the most productive, because the pain shows. In Men in Pink, I was trying to work with the high heels and telling the costume people, ‘I can't have it this high, take it down by half, and give me a wider base at the point of the heel. I’ve got to turn. I’ve got to do this heavy dance. I don’t want to twist my ankle. We don’t have the time to do it...’ I have copies of that episode, which I send out to sitcom producers as a measure of the comedy that I can do.”
Trebor has particularly fond memories of working with actor/director Bruce Campbell. “Bruce is a really good laugh,” Trebor enthuses. “As a director, he runs a really good ship. We approach acting in a slightly different way. Bruce takes acting seriously but very lightly at the same time. I don’t know if he has the ambitions to want to do Chekov. He thinks of himself more as a workman. I think about the problems of acting more and more, and I think I do it with a little more intensity than Bruce does. That’s not to say he isn’t extremely good at what he does. He’s a talented guy who does his job well. He's a good light comedian. As a buddy, and as a partner in the scenes and the episodes we did together, he’s terrific - we’d often do improvisational gags on each other.
“I also did a lot of improvisation with Renee O’Connor,” Trebor recalls. “At one point I say, ‘I’m not a eunuch’, and Renee says, ‘What’s the difference?’ And that’s where the scene was supposed to end. I said, ‘let me do a little improvisation’, so when she asks ‘what’s the difference?’, I pump my arm up and down suggestively and say, ‘I’ll tell you when you grow up’. I think the producers liked little things like that.”
No doubt Trebor’s ability to improvise was something which caught the attention of the creators of Hercules when it came to casting the character of Waylin in Hercules and the Lost Kingdom. “I had to improvise for the audition,” he recalls. “[Series Executive Producer] Rob Tapert and the casting director liked my improv, which I pitched somewhere between Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers and Eric Idle. So I was pushing that comedic direction to extremes.
“They didn’t want him to come off as gay,” Trebor adds. “They wanted him to be officious and exacting, but not gay. I said, ‘Yes, of course. I am Robert Trebor. I am heterosexual. I go for babes. I don’t have to make it gay.’
“Once the series was finally agreed, it turned out that they didn’t want a slave to continue as an ongoing character, so they wrote Salmoneus for me,” he remembers. “He was only due to be in two episodes at the very beginning, and then they wrote The Gauntlet with me in it, and then Unchained Heart.”
So how much was Trebor able to contribute to the development of Salmoneus’ character? “His salesman-like and greedy aspects were part of the character,” Trebor says. “The slightly lecherous tone was there as well. My contribution was to round him out so that he wasn't just lecherous and greedy, but a full human being and not just a comic foil. That’s not interesting for me as a character. So with the encouragement of both the directors and the producers, l feel I’ve made Salmoneus more loveable.
“I don’t need to be loved as a character,” he counters. “I’ve played plenty of unlikeable characters. But if you’re playing an ongoing character in a television series, it seems to me to be a richer experience if the audience cares about what’s happening to the person rather than going, ‘Oh, there’s the guy who’s going to fall down and pull down his pants and make us laugh’. That’s burlesque comedy, and that’s fine, but I think my contribution was to make Salmoneus more three-dimensional and more of a real person that people could identify with.”
Unsurprisingly, Trebor’s worst memories of working on Xena and Hercules involve physical discomfort. “In Mummy Dearest, I had to get a tetanus shot,” he says. “The rats were supposed to be falling off my head, and the producers said they’d been declawed, but then one got stuck, and I brushed it off back onto Hercules. My hair has thin patches, and at the end of the day there were some little scratches on the top of my head where the rat had broken the skin on my scalp. But compared to what Kevin and Michael were going through - with injuries and broken bones - that was comparatively minor.
“Another time was in Under the Broken Sky, when I was hung upside down with a girdle round my loins, and a rope around my neck. When they took it off, it turned out that because I had just flown, I was slightly dehydrated and it caused a kidney stone from the pressure of the flex around my kidneys and my own weight. So I had to go to the clinic and have X-rays. That actually went on for a couple of weeks, which was a drag.
“Ironically, though, it didn’t affect my work at all - it was between Under the Broken Sky and Fire Down Below. I was okay during working hours, but when I wanted to play at the weekend, I had to be in the clinic having my kidney stones attended to. I didn’t have to have any operations; I just had to have my system washed out.”
Trebor doesn’t expect to be making an appearance in Xena’s final season. “My name has come up,” be reveals, “and they were booting around the possibility of a modern day episode. It wasn’t going to be as Sal, although he was going to be in it as well, and my name was thrown out for a different kind of character in a modern day clip show. But it was discarded for some reason.
“I don't think Sal's dead,” he muses. “He could be in his seventies and would still be successful. To the delight of the fans, he could achieve some sort of success. But with the show's 25 year leap forward in time, I don't think it would work. Maybe he could be in a feature, after both shows are off the air…”
But Trebor has plenty to keep him busy away from the Xenaverse. There’s the possibility of being involved in the new series Tropical Storm, and he’s hoping to take his one man show, which updates Gogol’s play Diary of a Madman, around the college circuit with a view to a production in New York, Chicago or at the Edinburgh Festival. “My ongoing screenplay, My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean - about a murderer who’s convicted of killing his daughter - is going to shoot in the next year or so,” he adds. “So there are those two things on the immediate horizon, and we’ll have to wait and see what other interesting work comes along.”
And Trebor has every reason to remain confident that other interesting work will come along. As Hercules proved back in 1993, acting jobs can land in your lap at a moment's notice. “I literally didn’t know anything about it until the first week of December,” he explains. “I auditioned for it the second week, I got cast and went down to New Zealand the first week in January, and then I had a career for five and a half years. Two months before that I had no idea about the series!
“That’s both the joy and the peril of an actor's life. It's a huge rollercoaster, but it can turn on a phone call.”