They hung me upside down by my ankles!
by Sharon Delaney
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 12
I can show the costume material being painted and then open up the shot to see the completed costume on the harem wife. I can intercut scenes of Lucy being painted for the dance sequence and segue into her off in a dark part of the set working with the choreographer. I can show Renee warming her hands over the lamp in Gurkhan’s bedroom while Michael tells a sweet-smiling Calvin he needs to add a touch of sleaze to the scene.
My head has been filled with such thoughts ever since I came back from New Zealand. Even prepping for this interview with Lucy, the first thing I do when she calls is start reminiscing how terrific it was that Michael Hurst was directing the episode I filmed for the behind-the-scenes video for the next fan club kit.
I thanked Lucy for being so supportive during the time I was down there. She and Renee opened up every aspect of putting a show together for us.
“It was such a boon having Michael be the director,” I said excitedly. “He’s so articulate and hands-on. His personality and the fact that he’s an actor really adds to what people will see when he’s working. You said you enjoy having him as a director. Does his being an actor play a part in what he brings to the job for you?”
“Being an actor means he’s spent a lot of time on set and knows how it runs and how to keep it at an optimum pace,” she explained. “He knows how to roll with the punches. Knows when he has to compromise and when he absolutely will not. The schedule is crushing. The clock is always ticking and he’s got to keep it moving along. Sometimes you have to give up an idea for a really cool shot to ‘make the day’ (get done all the shots that were scheduled.) And he knows where the drama’s important.
“But the thing that makes Michael different from other actor/directors I’ve worked with is that he’s an artist. If you ever talked about acting being a craft, Michael is the classic example. He’s a classical actor. If you needed a piece to read at a wedding, he’s the person you’d ring. He knows everything about Shakespeare. And he’s back at University right now studying Greek heroes, myths and history, I believe. He’s indefatigable in his pursuit of knowledge as it pertains to the arts, philosophy and life in general. And he’s full of crazy facts. He’s just delightful.”
“He’s a better communicator?” I asked.
“It’s that we can speak shorthand,” Lucy laughed. “He knows what the acting process is. He knows how different actors work. I cannot have a director come up to me and discuss form and every bit of a scene. I find that limits me.”
I’d read interviews with other actors who said the same thing. Intricate discussion of the details of a scene nourishes some actors and stifles others. Robert DeNiro seems to be the former while Meryl Streep follows the latter technique. I wondered about Renee.
“Renee loves discussion,” Lucy stated definitively. “She’s liberated by sharing information or even butting heads. Where I feel they are imposing, putting up walls. If you’re an instinctual actor, I don’t need you coming in drawing dots for me to hit.
“Renee likes to be in control and master of her own domain and I can’t bear it. For example, we both receive a letter saying we’ve got looping up for three shows and it’s going to be quite a lot and we need to get it done by such and such a date. Renee is liberated by that letter because she can plan for it. I feel squashed. It’s a weight on my shoulders because it’s another thing I have to think about down the road.
“I would rather have them tell me on the day, ‘No, you can’t go home. You’ve got to go to looping after work.’ And I just deal with it then. Otherwise I spend two weeks in anticipation knowing I’ve got all these balls in the air or monkeys on my back.
“It’s like laying out steps for a dance. I’m a freeform dancer,” Lucy laughed. “Whereas Renee will discuss to the nth degree where those dots should go. That’s the way she works. That’s where she finds her freedom. Together we work just fine.”
I chuckled thinking when it comes to dance, I’m like Renee. If my mind doesn’t tell my feet where to go, they just sit there and look up at me. And I also remember a scene I saw on set where Lucy had a bucket of water thrown at her. She said she doesn’t want to know about things like that ahead of time. Otherwise, she’ll spend two weeks wondering what it’s going to be like, is the water going to be warm, how many times will they have to do it. Worrying about it drives her into a frazzle. Just show up with the bucket and dump it on her.
Having spent so much time watching Michael direct the episode we were filming, I came away with the image of him as a painter. He used the camera to caress the actors. There was a scene where Gabrielle is painting Xena. Michael started the camera on Xena’s feet, panned along the length of her body, followed her hand as it moved up to her face and ended with a closeup of Gabrielle putting the finishing touches on Xena’s eyes. It’s a moment I can’t wait to see in the episode when it airs.
“He’s very visual,” Lucy agreed. “He will have a tableau in his mind of how the scene should look at a certain point or how it should begin. You’ll notice Michael’s episodes often have a languid beauty and a majesty. Michael’s mind works like an orchestra and it will build to a crescendo. And you’ve got to get on Michael’s wave and ride with it.
“He’s also very forgiving and allows you to explore within his vision. But he knows how it should look in the end and you have to work with him.
“‘Antony & Cleopatra’ was a perfect example of his visual technique,” I said to Lucy, remembering the images I’d just looked at in the stills from that episode. The composition of the scenes was striking.
“There you go,” Lucy states with obvious admiration in her voice. “He sees the end product. He knows what he wants before it gets in the can. That’s what a great director does. And every now and again, you hit on someone truly terrific and you try to use them again and again.”
The season finale, “Motherhood,” had just aired and the shocking moment in that episode was Xena hitting Gabrielle in the back of the head with her chakram when she came upon Gabrielle stabbing Eve. I had asked both Lucy and Renee about that scene in the video interviews I did for the behind-the-scenes tape, but neither one seemed to quite know how to respond at the time. I got the impression we were going to hear more about that moment next season so I asked Lucy for an update.
“When you read that scene,” I started, “did you have any qualms about it? I realize it was very dramatic, but Xena’s skill with the chakram made it hard for me to believe she couldn’t have found another way to stop Gabrielle.
“I tried to imagine the turmoil someone would go through if their best friend were killing their child and they had no idea why,” I told her. “It’s obvious the child would come first, but still, the emotional confusion over seeing something like that would be wrenching. But we never got to see enough of Xena and Eve’s relationship to feel a familial bond between them. Whereas we’ve spent five years experiencing the love between Xena and Gabrielle.”
“I totally understand that,” Lucy stated. “We hope to address that again. What we’re looking for in the sixth season is a return to empowerment and to the friendship. That’s Rob’s desire and I’m sure it will happen.”
“Have you ever had a desire to write an episode for the show?” I wondered.
“No, I haven’t because I’m too busy and couldn’t devote the time to it,” she responded. “But I have input in the scripts. I’m not stifled. Renee and I have done more hours on Xena, at this point, than anyone except Rob and Bernie Joyce. We have a feeling for how a show is constructed. I sit and watch my husband go through every take. I’ve learned how you beef up the impact at certain points and where you drama lies and where you have to leave empty so just the music carries the scene. And Renee’s a natural director/actor.”
“I noticed in the readthrough we filmed that changes are made in the dialogue at that point,” I commented.
“I would never admit before that we would change anyone’s words because I didn’t have the chops,” Lucy said. “But we’ve done our time and no one can know your characters better than you do.”
She continued, “I do not know Renee’s character anywhere near as well as she does. So I often ask, ‘Well, what do you think about this scene? How can we make this sound a little more like us?’”
“You get Gabrielle’s input as well as Renee’s?” I laughed.
“Yeah,” she chuckled. “We’re in our sixth year and I don’t think you can expect any writer, especially the new ones we’re getting, to know our characters or the arc they’ve been through.”
“I remember a line in the readthrough where Gabrielle says, referring to Lila and Sarah, her niece, ‘They’re the only family I have left.’ And Renee said, ‘What about Xena?’ The script was referring to blood kin, but Renee was thinking about Gabrielle’s relationship with Xena.”
“She’s really great at that,” Lucy said admiringly. “When something’s not working and we need to retool it a little, you can always count on Renee to have a unique perspective of her character.
“Yesterday we were working on ‘The Haunting of Amphipolis’ and there were two scenes that began in exactly the same way. Gabrielle’s being hounded by someone verbally and the dialogue is repeated,” Lucy explained. “I thought, ‘I kind of like that. It’s a little bit surreal.’ I gave her an example of a way that I would have Xena play it and she said, ‘Yeah, but my character can’t do that.’ She knows Gabrielle’s unique perspective.”
“Rob mentioned he’s reading Beowulf?” I queried.
“He reads voraciously,” Lucy said, scrambling over to his desk to give me a rundown of the books that were on it. “Beowulf’s something he’s been studying for the last couple months. He’s read everything about the Caesars and fifty books about the Bible. What am I looking at at the moment?” she mused to herself. “The Formation of Hell by Alan E. Bernstein, Falcon Feather and the Valkyrie’s Sword by D.J. Conway, Angelic Mysteries and the Divine Feminine by Ted Andrews, a book on the art of Delaquoix, Devils, Demons and Witchcraft by Ernst and Johanna Lehner, and The Twelve Caesars by Michael Grant. Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths is a standard. And he reads every magazine he can get on every subject he’s looking into. National Geographic’s a great source.”
The new “Lyre, Lyre” Xena CD soundtrack had just arrived in the office and I was having fun listening to Lucy singing the Beatles’ song “We Can Work It Out,” that had been cut from the episode. I’d had the tape on when she called. Now I remembered reading in another magazine that Lucy and some friends had put together a band.
“Kind of,” she said shyly. “I write some music with friends.”
“You’re the lyricist?” I tiptoed a little further into this obviously very personal territory.
“Yeah. Sometimes I come up with songs as well,” she offered. “Or one of the guys will flick me a music bed (rhythm track) he’s written and ask me to put a song on top of it. Then I’ll work on both the melody and words.”
Lucy was getting a bit more into this subject and came up with an idea the fans might like, but I’ll save that for the next issue.
Do any of you remember a very old interview with Lucy that was printed when Xena had just started airing and she talked about going to the bank in costume during her lunch break? She told everyone she was an exotic dancer. Well, the shenanigans on the streets of Auckland continue to this day. On one of the days we were filming the video, Xena was having the stuffing knocked out of her and was wearing a prosthetic battered eye.
“I heard there was some sadness behind that fake eye they gave you,” I said sympathetically to Lucy.
She started off forlornly, “Sometimes you have bad days. I have a bit of a bad back and I’d hurt myself. But you have to soldier on at work. They put the prosthetic eye on me and it was glued very tightly to my eye socket. I was hurting and freezing and so miserable that I started to cry into the eye patch.” Lucy began to chuckle. “But the tears had nowhere to escape! They welled up inside and mixed with the glue and started stinging. It made me even more miserable.” Lucy’s description makes her laugh even harder.
“I know it’s not funny,” I said, joining in the laughter, “but the way you told the story on camera was so sad and pitiful. I pictured this poor person with her eye covered up and dripping fake blood and the tears flooding up inside. And you were telling the story with such relish! How many people have such problems at work?”
“Yeah!” Lucy exclaimed. “I go to the acupuncturist and he says, ‘What happened this time?’ And I said, ‘They hung me upside down by my ankles and whipped me…’ Or I’ll go to the chiropractor and I’m covered in makeup bruises and dripping blood.” Lucy’s laughing and really getting into this. “I turn up there and say, ‘I was fighting a demon and one of his horns flew up and hit me.’ Or I was being crucified and slipped off my cross.’”
“You must make for good dinnertime conversation when these guys get home,” I teased.
“‘Ahhh, that Lucy Lawless came in today and…’” she mimicked, in a stuffed shirt doctor-type voice filled with awe.
They may be going to hang Lucy upside down in season six, but last year they sent a fireball chasing after her in “Amphipolis Under Siege.”
“Do you remember that?” I ask, wondering if this had made an impression on her.
Silence.
“You know, fireball, small cave, lots of heat,” I prompted.
More silence. Have we been disconnected?
Last interview she didn’t remember biting Ares’ chest and now she doesn’t recall a fireball fifteen feet from her back! My God, this woman is a stoic. Nothing fazes her.
“I sort of remember,” she says and I can hear her brow furrowing. “Was there a corridor?”
“Yes!” I cheer. “Now you’ve got it.” I feel like Professor Higgins.
“Oh yeah!” I can hear the smile of memory in her voice. “You know, the special effects person will run through it for you first and say the fireball’s not going to come within cooee of you. Do you say that in America?” she asked me.
“Cooee?” I asked in a puzzled voice.
“It means within a hoodekey. It’s one of those watchamacallit-type expressions. It means it’s not going to come too close. Anyway, it gives you an extra impetus to get moving. Which I always need - not being an actual runner,” Lucy laughed.
“You telling me they have to light a fire behind Lucy to get her to run?” I teased.
“They have to light a fire under my ass to get me to move!” And she dissolves into laughter.
“You seem to want to do as many of the stunts as you can,” I said, thinking about the sequence where they hung her upside down for about ten minutes.
“It’s not that, it’s gotta be done. If you don’t see the actor going through it, you’re cheated on screen. If the actual character’s not experiencing it. And, for expedience, I had to do it. They didn’t have time. Remember, it was right before wrap and they had two cameras running. If they had done just one camera with me, if they had only done the closeup. I could have hung with my knees bent from a bar.
“But because they needed the wide angle shot to run at the same time, it had to be me. And making our schedule is so important to me. You’ve gotta be production friendly in this kind of show. Maybe it’s because I’m the producer’s wife. I care desperately that all the drama gets told within a certain time period because it’s just so expensive. That clock is always ticking and I’m very aware of it.
“When they say, ‘Cameras up, I am dressed and ready. There is no, ‘Oh, I’ve just gotta get my gauntlets on,’ or ‘I’m going to the loo now.’ That constitutes bad behavior down where I come from. It doesn’t help the team get on.”
There’s one more question about adrenaline-rush-type activities I want to ask. Lucy did an interview for a magazine and she and the reporter went to Six Flags amusement park. They went on a roller coaster and a bungee drop thingy.
“I saw a program last night on the attraction of roller coasters. I don’t go on them,” I informed Lucy, “because in my mind they are all going to leave the tracks and go sailing off into the air.”
I was certain the boisterous laughter I heard on the other end of the phone could not have belonged to Lucy. Some stranger must have walked into the room with her. Oh, who am I kidding. She was laughing herself silly.
“And you,” I accused archly, “were flying along on these rides telling the reporter, ‘Embrace death, darling.’”
“I don’t understand the fear of that sort of thing,” she explained. “Well, I do, but I guess that’s why I like it. My daughter’s the same and I suspect Julius will be too. He would love to roughhouse all day. We’re trying to keep him gentled because we know he’s going to be a really rambunctious kid. He’s such fun and he’s got such a great sense of humor already that we’re trying to introduce gentleness and tranquility as well.
“But I just love roller coasters. I love having my stomach rise up into my mouth.”
Speaking of amusement parks and haunted houses.
“You going to go off and be a ghost when we’re done?” I asked.
“No, I’m no ghost. But I do go into the spirit world. Renee’s the one who had to eat the maggots,” Lucy said with awe in her voice. “She had to be covered in slime made of KY jelly, puree asparagus and marbled through with vegemite! It was the color of the most pernicious snot you can possibly imagine.”
I could feel my face scrunching up as Lucy got more and more descriptive.
“She was covered in this filthy-smelling stuff. Adrienne (‘Eve’) and I were just about retching. And Renee was inured to it. She was prepared for it mentally and didn’t complain.
“Pureed asparagus is the most awful thing in the world. We had to pull her out of this hole - the bog of Eternal Stench. I thought to myself, ‘I am never complaining about anything again.’ Renee was amazing,” Lucy said proudly. “Totally amazing!”
I scribbled down the recipe from Hell and made it question number one on my list of things to ask Renee next time we talk.