Would you buy a used chariot from this man?
By Robert Trebor.
Salmoneus, the con man’s con man, has become one of the most popular recurring characters on Xena and Hercules.
The Official Magazine: Issue 02
The first time my character meets Xena is in the ‘Warrior Princess’ trilogy of Hercules. Those episodes made me available to work on Xena with a history. I didn’t have to come in as a new character, so in ‘The Black Wolf,’ Xena can say, ‘Oh, Salmoneus, you’re such a scrounger,’ and you don’t have to explain something to the audience because there’s already a back story that they have together.
Actually, the first time I worked with Lucy, she was playing a different character (in Hercules, “As Darkness Falls”). She was playing a slightly bad girl - the vixen character essentially - in contrast to the bride, who was the more Snow White character. Lucy was great to work with. She had this incredible experience as a travel reporter for Air New Zealand. Sometimes when I’m flying at four in the morning, and if it’s getting bouncy while we’re going over the Equator, I’ll watch what’s on the screen - and there’s Lucy standing on the lip of a volcano or standing on a gondola; she’s literally traveled all over the world doing these special reports for Air New Zealand.
One of my favorite scenes in Xena was in ‘The Greater Good.’ I love the funeral scene with Lucy where she’s dead, especially after we just came out of a comedy scene. In fact, there was a comedy scene right before that which had to be cut because of time, where I’m actually looking to make chicken soup for Xena to make her better, and a guy hits me over the head and the chicken flies off - it was a great scene. There are a lot of great scenes that don’t actually make it because of time. We have to fit 44 minutes and 32 seconds for the commercials to go in there, so I’ve shot a lot of stuff that I’m disappointed didn’t make the final cut.
There are bits of scenes in all the episodes where I think I could have done better if I had extra time or a couple of extra takes. In ‘The Black Wolf,’ I like the scene where I’m whining like the Black Wolf just before I get tossed, but the director was handling something else, and I kind of asked if I could choreograph that moment. Comedy is often a very technical matter, and unfortunately we just didn’t have time to do another take. That’s the difference between TV and film; you have to move on, and you have to be as good and optimistic as you can. You can’t dwell on these moments, because it’s going to ruin the next scene. Sometimes they just can’t give you that extra take and I understand that. You just have to live with it, and the audience doesn’t know what’s happening; they would have liked it even more if it had been done perfectly.
The relationship that Salmoneus has with Xena is very different than the one he has with Hercules. I think Lucy is a very attractive woman, so it’s not my playing that, it’s just my responding to that feeling I have about her. She’s also very funny and very much a hoot. When I’m working with Kevin on Hercules, he’ll talk about his girlfriend, or what’s happening with our respective families; I don’t do that with Lucy. She’s a little ‘fizzier’ much of the time; she’s more anxious to shake off the Xena fierceness, and balance it out.