The return of warrior princess Lucy Lawless
In an exclusive interview, the star of Xena: Warrior Princess opens up about the legacy of the show that made her a household name, her new Australian series and why she’s happy to be typecast as a “strong woman”.
Stellar
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Two weeks after her youngest son Judah was born, actor Lucy Lawless decided the family needed to escape the freezing temperatures of Auckland’s winter and head for the warmer climes of the Fiji Islands.
It was 2002, a year after her hit American television series Xena: Warrior Princess had ended. Claiming she was “misshapen and overweight” after giving birth, Lawless did not expect the reception that awaited her when she touched down in Fiji.
“The Fijians recognised me and came from all over the Islands to look at me,” the actor, 51, tells Stellar with a laugh.
Being recognised has not diminished over time; 18 years since the show aired its last episode, Xena endures, and to this day, Lawless is still pointed at, approached for photos and greeted by fans.
“I get recognised by Filipinos and Turkish people, and people in New York the most. And Fiji Islanders, of course. I am still staggered that people remember [Xena] and me all these years later.”
And yet the role that changed Lawless’s life almost never came her way at all. The original actor cast to play Xena in what was supposed to be a three-episode arc on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys was British star Vanessa Angel, who fell ill and could not travel to New Zealand — the country where Lawless was born and where the series filmed.
The field was open for Lawless to step in, which she did; at the end of her stint, Lawless’s character was meant to die, but the studio was looking to make a spin-off and her portrayal was well-received by audiences and critics alike.
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Xena: Warrior Princess exploded onto screens in September 1995 and ran until June 2001, outliving sister show Hercules by two years and arguably superseding it in popularity.
The cult series long ago entered the pop-culture lexicon, and the creators of strong female characters, such as Buffy Summers from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Sydney Bristow of Alias and Beatrix Kiddo from Kill Bill, have all attributed elements of their characters to Xena.
![“I am still staggered that people remember [<i>Xena</i>] and me all these years later.” (Picture: Cameron Grayson for Stellar)](https://content.api.news/v3/images/bin/3c78f8978249592e881fa61f0144cdb6?width=650)
Lawless, who can still do the character’s iconic battle cry, remains proud of its legacy.
“I’m grateful for everything the role gave me and I had a great time doing it,” she says. “I’m immensely proud of what a bunch of kids at the bottom of the world managed to achieve in the mid-’90s.”
And while there is nothing about her experience on the show that she would change — “it was all part of my destiny” — Lawless emphatically admits she “never, ever enjoyed the stunts, and they were every day of my life. So I got quite good at them... but I did not ever learn to enjoy them.”
One of the main reasons the show has maintained its cult status is due to the relationship between its main characters Xena and Gabrielle (played by Lawless’s good friend Renée O’Connor).
As the show progressed, the initial friendship between the protagonists grew into romantic love, albeit only ever alluded to and never explicitly mentioned.
But in an interview with Lesbian News in 2003, Lawless remarked: “Nope, they’re married, man.” The intervening years have only cemented that position.
“That’s where the characters settled,” Lawless now tells Stellar. “At first, even [O’Connor and I] didn’t see that coming, but the producers and writers knew what they were doing.
“And it doesn’t even matter. Who cares anymore? Gay is part of normal. I know in other parts of the world this is still a new concept but, for god’s sake, we just want total equality.”
During the 1990s and early noughties, when beauty was defined by waif-thin models and actors, and the body-positivity movement was still a number of years away, Lawless’s fuller figure was a departure from the norm.
She represented physical strength and a natural beauty, prompting People magazine to list her as one of its 50 most beautiful people in the world in 1997.
The actor squirms when reminded of this, and also hesitates to consider herself a role model when the subject is brought up.
“I don’t think about it, for the most part. I respect my fans enough to know that they have their own minds to make up.
“I expect them to behave according to their consciences and not be living for what they think I’m about,” says Lawless, who nevertheless publicly and passionately supports same-sex marriage and is also heavily involved with the Starship Foundation, an organisation that raises money for kids in hospital.
She has been a Greenpeace ambassador since 2009, an advocacy that led to her being arrested in 2012 for trying to stop an oil-drilling ship from taking part in oil exploration — and which she says she would “happily do again. My responsibility is to be a good person for myself and my children. It’s very hard to live up to other people’s expectations.”
Lawless was born Lucille Frances Ryan in Auckland, one of six children to parents Julie and Frank, and she describes her childhood as idyllic.
“I was a happy-go-lucky kid. My best friend Michele and I were always devising plays and musicals and collecting bottles to return to the store for a refund, which we would spend on lollies. This took all our waking hours.”
She always loved performing, starring in her first musical at age 10, but ultimately it was acting that Lawless felt drawn to.
“For some reason,” she says, “it always wins out. I don’t know why it is that acting is such an imperative for me, whereas singing is a beautiful addition.” She studied it in school and would later attend the renowned William Davis Center for Actors Study in Canada under William B. Davis.
At 18, she and then-boyfriend Garth Lawless travelled to Europe and Australia. They married in Western Australia in 1988 after Lawless fell pregnant with her first child Daisy, and divorced seven years later.
Lawless went on to marry the founding partner of the production company that made Xena — producer, director and writer Robert Tapert — in 1998, and the pair have two children together, Julius, 19, and Judah, 17.
The couple have collaborated on a number of projects, which Lawless insists is not a hardship. “We’re so used to it and we work really well together, and we never occupy the same niche,” she says.
Xena looms large over Lawless’s career, but she has remained busy in the years since it left the air, taking roles in films and particularly on notable TV shows, such as Battlestar Galactica, Parks And Recreation and Spartacus, where she cemented her status as a lesbian icon by playing a bisexual character.
She has also fulfilled her musical aspirations, appearing in stage productions such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Chicago.
Earlier this year, Lawless posted a video on Twitter in which she sang a song — first heard on Xena — as a personal tribute to those killed in the Christchurch mosque shootings.
“My mother and I have something to do with the refugee centre close to our home and they had people stopping and helping them, just out of the blue,” Lawless says as tears well in her eyes. “When it breaks, your heart comes back together bigger. It shatters, but it never goes back the same size it was.”
Lawless was in Australia when the attack occurred, deep in the midst of filming a new mystery series for Network 10 called My Life Is Murder, in which she plays Alexa Crowe, a detective she says may be most similar to her out of all the roles she has taken so far.
“In fact, it might be Lucy plus plus, because sometimes life imitates art... I started becoming more and more like Alexa. Firstly she was becoming more and more like me, and then suddenly she kind of took over a little bit.”
The show has given Lawless a chance to work with friends like Magda Szubanski, who has a guest-starring role. The women — who have crossed paths at social events in the past — form something of a mutual admiration society.
“She’s so kind,” Lawless says of her Aussie co-star. “She will talk to a moron with the same respect she would talk to a Nobel Prize winner, which is a rare gift. I adore her.”
Szubanski’s take? “It was a blast working with Lucy,” she tells Stellar. “I was a massive, bordering on stalker, fan of Xena back in the day, but Lucy in real life is even better. It was a real treat.”
Murder director and Wentworth actor Leah Purcell agrees. “Lucy’s been around for forever,” she says. “Not that that’s her age, but her experience — she makes everyone feel so at ease.”
Asked to consider how Xena helped pave the way for women’s roles to evolve in both nuance and complexity, Lawless replies that everyone is the better for it.
And she talks about watching avidly as the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have “empowered young women not to take sh*t. What’s wrong with that?”
Lawless would know, given she spent years living that message onscreen. What those years on Xena wrought — recognition the world over, a firm place in TV history — and what has come after is something at which she can only marvel.
“If I’m typecast as a ‘strong woman’ for the rest of my life, then I’ve got all the right problems.”
My Life Is Murder premieres 8.30pm, Wednesday July 17, on Network 10.
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Originally published as The return of warrior princess Lucy Lawless
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