Long after Xena, Lucy Lawless directs a film about another warrior princess

Lucy Lawless knows she will always be remembered for starring in the hit TV series Xena: Warrior Princess – a pop culture phenomenon that ran from 1995 to 2001.

“At a time when there was no streaming, when cable was in its infancy, everybody saw the show,” the New Zealand actor-turned-director says from Los Angeles. “It was appointment television.

“These days you have to be Taylor Swift to get worldwide name recognition”: Lucy Lawless has turned to directing for Never Look Away.Credit: South by South West Sydney.

“In New York, for example, we were on WPIX for six solid years – same bat-time, same bat-channel. Everybody there grew up with it.

“It gave me a worldwide recognition that’s very hard to get. These days you have to be Taylor Swift to get worldwide name recognition.”

After a successful acting career that has included the series Battlestar Galactica, three Spartacus iterations, Parks and Recreation, Salem and My Life Is Murder, it was Xena that helped Lawless debut as a director for the documentary Never Look Away, about maverick New Zealand-born CNN photojournalist Margaret Moth.

“When I’m going to pitch a show about a real life warrior princess, they go ‘Lucy Lawless-Margaret Moth’, ‘real life warrior princess, played one on TV’,” she says. “That story is very useful for selling because it’s hooky.

“So Xena has been helpful in so many, many ways – an amazing fan base; also, it’s where I met my husband [American producer Rob Tapert]. It did everything for me. I’m very grateful.”

South by South West Sydney will announce on Wednesday that Never Look Away will have its Australian premiere in a lively program of screenings, talks and seminars at the festival next month.

Lawless, now 56, admits that, despite years of encouragement from her husband, she “never, ever” wanted to direct.

“I don’t know why I thought it was such a bum job,” she says. “But I got this email from Margaret Moth’s best friend, who said ‘do you want to make a film about my mate’s life? I’ve got a suitcase of her memories.’

“And I was possessed in that moment by this zeal that I can’t quite explain. It’s like she grabbed me and booted me through the directing door. It was nothing I wanted to do before; now it’s all I want to do.”

Margaret Moth’s career took her to many global trouble spots.Credit: SXSW Sydney

The fascination was that Moth was a remarkable character – a fearless correspondent in such trouble spots as Baghdad, Sarajevo, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Zaire [now the Democratic Republic of the Congo] while being an unashamed hedonist who enjoyed booze, drugs and casual sex.

“As feminism was just ramping up in the ’70s, she had already eschewed everything about the roles of women in society,” Lawless says. “She had gone and got her tubes tied – she just knew motherhood wasn’t for her.”

Lawless says she was so possessed by Moth’s story that she committed to directing despite not being sure she was qualified to do it.

“She made me brave,” she says. “That’s the lesson of Margaret Moth – it’s about living up to your potential.”

While it seems like it could have been a strong biopic along the lines of the coming Lee, which has Kate Winslet as war photographer Lee Miller, Lawless says a documentary seemed more challenging, and it was possible to get cracking more quickly.

“Xena has been helpful in so many, many ways”: Lucy Lawless in Xena: Warrior Princess.

“I started just as COVID was starting to bust out,” she says. “I was so afraid we would lose some of the participants due to this unknown worldwide pandemic that I grabbed a friend and interviewed people in America who I thought wouldn’t be there if I didn’t get funding for 10 years.

“Eventually, we did get funding … and two-and-a-half years after that first email, we were premiering at Sundance, which was the biggest surprise of my life.”

Lawless says Never Look Away is not strictly a documentary in that it’s not about material facts.

“It’s a documentary-style film because it’s about subtext,” she says. “It’s about who’s telling the truth, who’s a reliable narrator, because the testimonies don’t quite line up.

“So I’ve got Margaret’s lovers with competing narratives, and they’re really fun. She was a wild woman in terms of sex, drugs and punk music. All her colleagues were [stunned] to see this film and realise who their lauded colleague was in her private life.”

Never Look Away screens at South By South West Sydney, which runs from October 14-20. Lucy Lawless will speak at a cinema Q&A and a session about her life in film and television.

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