The Genesis of Xena
By Sharon Delaney
The Official Magazine: Issue 01
It’s the 1950s and I’m growing up with Betty Anderson from Father Knows Best and Donna Reed. I see women that stay at home, cook, wear gingham dresses and aprons. “How was your day, dear?” is the most important question they get to ask.
Jump ahead to 1968. I’m about to become part of the next generation of women. Around me female students are taking college campuses hostage; prominent leaders are being assassinated; the Beatles rule music, clothes and haircuts; and the buzz word is “revolution.” Where is Betty Anderson?!
From the 70s to the 80s, women had no clear-cut picture of who or what they were supposed to be. They were told they could be anything they wanted. But what did they want? On television there was a hint that changes were on the way with Wonder Woman, the Bionic Woman and Emma Peel of The Avengers.
And then in September 1995, there was Xena: Warrior Princess. From the start this was something very different. A female warrior. A “don’t-even-think-of-patronizing-me” woman who didn’t only stand alongside men in battle, but led them.
She’s mysterious, dangerous - a woman with a past so dark, she will spend the rest of her life atoning for it. Such a heroine would never have been allowed on television before this time. Xena’s past isn’t merely shady; it’s brutal, violent. She led an army that resulted in the loss of 10,000 lives in a single battle. She was a warlord who conquered and plundered village after village.
How could such a person become a role model? The women who look up to her seem to be saying, “There is that type of power and strength inside us that has never been acknowledged or allowed.” That alone guaranteed Xena’s status as role model extraordinaire, not to mention pop cultural icon.
A spin-off from the Hercules series produced by Rob Tapert. He has said that he wanted to do a female action hero as far back as ten years ago: “Every time I thought of it, I was coming from the wrong point of view. I was coming from her starting from being good. Once I have her a dark past, I instantly saw how you make it work.
“When the first one was partially in the can, I knew then I had found what I was looking for,” amplifies Tapert. “We were just shooting ‘The Gauntlet’ and hadn’t shot the third one yet. The studio was worried about Vanishing Son and wanted something to take its place. We changed the end of the third episode because, originally, Xena was slated to die.”
When Universal Studios first asked Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert to consider producing a series based on Hercules, they preferred tackling Robert E. Howard’s Conan character, but the rights weren’t available. If they were, would we now be enjoying the adventures of Red Sonja, Warrior Princess? (Sonja, for the uninitiated, is a fearless red-haired swordswoman/Conan ally also created by Howard).
Says Tapert: “You know, I saw Red Sonja (the 1985 movie version featuring Bridgette Neilsen) and thought, ‘Man, did they screw up that thing.’ The comic that Roy Thomas did was really good, but the movie got ‘Dinofied.’ That could have worked, but I think Xena is a product of its time. It got into a phenomena that was slightly bigger than a TV show with rising women’s consciousness and toughness. There are so many pitfalls in having a successful show. If you don’t have the right cast, you’re dead. Therefore, Hercules, with Kevin Sorbo, and Xena, with Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor - you need those people to have the thing work.”
The Xena character, of course, was co-created by Tapert and writer/producer John Schulian. “John was producing Hercules and said he wanted to do a story of Hercules and the woman who comes between him and his best friend,” recalls Tapert. I’d been working on this idea for a three-episode arc of an evil warrior princess who had a lot of those Hong-Kong fighting abilities and was a real tough, nasty character who would kill her own men and do whatever she had to do to succeed. John wrote the first episode and I hand-walked the writer through the second one, ‘The Gauntlet,’ which became the turning point. It’s basically the movie THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR. I love that Hong Kong stuff. We got into a credit arbitration when it went to series and the major share of it went to John because he wrote the first script.”:
Vanessa Angel was originally cast in the role because she was doing a Universal show called Weird Science and the studio wanted to cross-promote the two programs. They could make use of Angel because the Xena character was supposed to die. That would have become a problem once it was decided to make Xena a series!
Rob Tapert remembers that early, difficult period: “When we were doing the casting, we wanted to use Lucy but she wasn’t available. And we had used her in an episode of Hercules that shot just before Christmas break. And then on December 29, we got a call from Vanessa’s agent in London saying she had the flu and was too sick to fly for a couple weeks. (She was only available to us for a certain period of time), so we couldn’t push back the shooting schedule. On December 30, we made some furious calls around Los Angeles, but no one wanted to get on a plane on December 31 to fly to New Zealand. We actually found Lucy on a camping trip!”
“We had planned to have Xena be a redhead in the tradition of Red Sonja,” explains Tapert. “We had used Lucy in Hercules and the Amazon Women as a blonde and as a redhead in an episode of Herc that was going to air just before the Xena trilogy. When we told the studio we were casting Lucy Lawless, they said you just used her and the episodes are going to air one after the other. I called down to New Zealand and told the producer to change her hair to black. He said Lucy had already suggested that and it was done! She also has a half-hour dip every day to darken her skin because it’s incredibly white.”
And why, exactly, is our tough-as-nails heroine referred to as a “Warrior Princess”? “If I told you that I’d ruin one of the episodes we’ve got coming up this season,” laughs Tapert. “We did a show last year, ‘Destiny,’ that worked, where we told a present-day story and Xena’s back story as an evil character. This year we’re doing it over a two-episode arc. Over the course of this show you will find out everything you need to know about Xena and her title of Warrior Princess.”
In addition to suggesting Xena’s darker look, Lucy Lawless also came up with the character’s memorable, near Farsi-like war cry (the “war yodel,” as some fans call it). And what about Xena’s signature weapon, the infamous “round killing thing”?
“This is where I don’t mind stepping on John Schulian’s head a bit,” interjects Tapert. “I had a book of ancient weapons and I saw this weird discus called the chakram and I said let’s give her this because it can return and we’ll never have another character use it. They used it a little bit in the first episode. And then in ‘The Gauntlet,’ I said let’s (take it a step further) so it ‘pings’ off of rocks. And John saw that and said he hated it and we should cut around that weapon. And I told him that weapon is the coolest thing I’d ever seen - it’s her signature piece.”
It’s pretty much written in stone now that Xena is a mortal, but from the beginning it seemed like she must have some kind of godlike something in her background to justify a lot of the amazing feats she performs. Many fans believe that Ares, the God of war, is Xena’s true father.
“We haven’t given up on that,” Tapert says slyly. “There’s still a hint and we tackle it in an unresolved fashion this season. We certainly leave it that in her mind she’s mortal. We’re playing something over the next couple of years which is the decline of the Greek gods and what impact that had and where our mortality or immortality comes from. (Writer/Producer) R.J. Stewart and myself are both history nuts. Even though the show doesn’t take place in any particular period of time, there certainly was a lot of interesting social stuff happening in the last 500 years before the birth of Christ. We are playing interesting questions of faith in our show.”
Of course, with female heroic characters, it helps to have a darker tone so that their adventures don’t come across as too goody-goody. “That was always a concern of ours, maintaining the intensity and believability of these people,” says Tapert. “And it’s going to come up this year episodically. We have a schism between Xena and Gabrielle over each of them telling a single lie that seems innocuous and just seems to mushroom. We will be challenging them and even in the present day we will see flashes of that dark, more dangerous Xena.
“It’s the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle… that we’re watching against whatever warlords they’re fighting. It’s all about their relationship and character and growth. I think people find that interesting. And our approach in writing is, ‘Where’s the heart? How is this affected?’ And I think both Lucy and Renee are fantastic at taking what’s written and saying, ‘How do I play this so that we get the most emotion from these sequences.’ People can relate to them and understand their feelings and the emotional threads.”
Most fans of Xena and Hercules are aware of the shows’ differences in tone and content, and many have their own theories about this. A popular view holds that Xena is the deeper of the two because little girls mature faster than boys and demand more thoughtful storylines and characters. “No,” clarifies Rob Tapert. “The truth is, I tried to go for crass commercialism and I was wrong and I hurt Hercules as a result of it. When we got the order for Xena, I said this is the darker show. Every single person agreed with me. There was a great deal of interest in toy lines so the whole second year of Hercules was much lighter than the first 13 we had done. It had monsters, it had blatant merchandising possibilities. All of which everyone failed to capitalize on. Now I wish that there were episodes in the second season where we had taken Hercules much darker and this coming year we are doing that. We have found that Hercules actually works best when we do really heartfelt, tragic episodes.
“What I found is that kids actually like the darker stuff. It’s just not available to them. The most watched movie for the 2 to 11-year-old group is Jean Claude Van Damme’s DEATH WARRANT!”
“And we also shouldn’t forget, because Lucy and Renee are really incredibly gifted comedians, one out of four Xena episodes is an off-the-wall screwball comedy. And these seem to be just as popular as the darker stories.”
Obviously there’s a lot more going on here than any of Xena’s various creators could have anticipated. What began as an exotic action-adventure spin-off has evolved into a pop cultural phenomenon with - of all things - social relevance. How does executive producer/co-creator Rob Tapert want his unique brainchild to be remembered years from now?
“I’d like Xena: Warrior Princess to be remembered as a show that entertained people during a portion of the last decade of this millennium,” he says, “and that the people who watched it took whatever they wanted from it and used it in a positive and useful way in their lives.”
And so, with the arrival of Xena, women finally have an alternative role model to Betty Anderson.