Xena: Warrior Princess: An Oral Herstory

[Ubiquitous]

How Xena went from sword-wielding heroine to feminist icon
by Natalie Abrams

To mark the upcoming 15th anniversary of the beloved fantasy series’
finale, EW spoke with Xena: Warrior Princess co-creator Rob Tapert
and stars Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor to find out how Xena went
from sword-wielding heroine to feminist icon.

Ahead of the 1995 debut of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys,
Universal Television started mulling a companion piece. For the
flagship, Hercules executive producer Rob Tapert pitched an evil
warrior princess to appear in a three-episode arc before being
killed. But things turned out differently…
ROB TAPERT: At that time, there were no female superhero shows on
TV, and really Bionic Woman and Cagney & Lacey were the two most
identifiable female-driven shows that had been on. While they had
been somewhat successful, they had never repeated in syndication
very well. The guys at Universal quickly said, “You know what? You
should rip yourself off before somebody else does and try and make a
spin-off out of that character.” At that time, the head of the
studio gave me a lecture about why he was going to do this. He was
concerned that female heroes don’t really work well on television
and never to take my eye off the ball of Hercules.

Lucy Lawless, who had appeared on Hercules playing two other
characters, was far from the first choice to play the leather-clad
heroine. A former warlord spared by Hercules, Xena embarked on a
journey of redemption as penance for her crimes.
TAPERT: Because it was never thought to be a spin-off originally,
when we were doing the evil warrior princess arc, Universal asked us
if we would consider using somebody from one of their other shows
who they liked a great deal, and they thought would bring viewership
to Hercules. Then that actress [Weird Science’s Vanessa Angel] got
sick and we were stuck scrambling to find a replacement. We had just
worked with Kim Delaney up in Toronto on a made-for-video movie at
the time and she was great, and I called her and she said yes, and
her manager called like a half hour later and said, “No, she’s not
going to do that, it will take her out of pilot season.”
LUCY LAWLESS: They scrambled to get a number of actresses to come
from Los Angeles [to New Zealand], but it was pilot season. It was
shooting through January and in those days you didn’t leave town, so
they all turned it down thinking it was [only] a three-episode arc.
TAPERT: Ultimately the studio said, “Well, just get the woman who
had been in that last Hercules and dye her hair black.”
LAWLESS: It fell to me when everybody else turned it down. I was the
lucky local kid on the spot who got the gig.
TAPERT: When they saw the dailies of that episode, they thought,
“Yeah, we should do a spin-off.”
LAWLESS: I thought it was an entirely natural process: “This is what
naturally happens in the course of American shows.” I was that
green. I’m a kid from the bottom on the world, and I just thought,
“Of course it gets to be a big success and then you go to Hollywood
and get a career.” It’s only now that I’m sweating bullets at the
extreme, almost cataclysmic good luck that I had. All the stars all
lined up.

The key then was finding Xena’s partner in crime, Gabrielle.
TAPERT: Just prior to starting Xena, some writer who was hot at the
time said, “Every single story’s a story of redemption,” and I
thought about it and I’m like, “Yeah, at some level it is.” But in
this particular case, what does it mean when you’re no longer evil
and you want to find a better moral compass in life? Gabrielle was
that moral compass for Xena and that united them together.
RENEE O’CONNOR: I remember auditioning for Rob Tapert and [co-
executive producer] Eric Gruendemann. They recognized me from an
Australian TV movie.
TAPERT: We had used Renee in a two-hour movie of Hercules and I
loved her onscreen presence, so when we came up with the idea of
Xena and Gabrielle, Renee was always front and center in my mind as
to who Gabrielle was. We went through a lot of casting, because the
studio wanted to look at other options. Was she too young? Was she
too this? Was she too that? We brought her back numerous times.
O’CONNOR: I had to go through an extensive audition process for
Gabrielle.
TAPERT: There was somebody else who was the sultry version of
Gabrielle, a different way of going, and who was actually a very
fine actress in her own right, but ultimately I prevailed.
O’CONNOR: I was hired out of L.A. I moved to New Zealand and met
Lucy at our first table read. I remember having dinner with Lucy
maybe about a week into the show just so we could have a get-to-
know-you time.
LAWLESS: She had this character that was supposed to be sort of
worshipful and she was looking at me like that and I was like, “Stop
that. What are you doing?”
O’CONNOR: I was more fascinated with her story and who the actress
was. It took us a little bit longer to get to know each other, but
I’m probably her biggest fan.
LAWLESS: She was just a little bit younger and I think she was just
imbued with the Gabrielle of it all. We went through a lot of
changes. We went through our twenties together. We’re really,
totally sisters. There is a lot of trust and protectiveness between
the two of us. She’s a great, great woman and she’s become a great
artist.

Airing in 100-plus countries, Xena was a worldwide sensation,
ranking in the top five syndicated drama series during each of its
six seasons — but it wasn’t an out-of-the-gate success.
TAPERT: When we got the first week’s ratings, I was a little
surprised because Xena should have done a little better at 9 o’clock
with Hercules at 8 o’clock. It took a full year for Xena to rise in
the ratings.
O’CONNOR: I remember a couple of different times when Lucy would
come back to America for publicity for the show — she did publicity
with Kevin Sorbo, who was playing Hercules — and I remember a time
when people knew her name as much as they knew Kevin’s. But that
surprised me because, as far as I knew, we were working in New
Zealand and no one knew what we were doing, and we were like the
stepchild.
TAPERT: In terms of knowing when it was successful, I guess when we
got the second season order, and at that time our goal had been to
have Hercules and Xena beat Deep Space Nine and to beat Baywatch,
which were the other shows in syndication at that time. Could we
ever catch them? That was the yardstick we used to gauge how the
show was doing.

While Xena slowly gained a following, the cast and crew shot the
first season in a bubble in New Zealand in a pre-social media era.
TAPERT: It took Xena its own first season, truthfully, almost the
entire first season, to find its own legs in defining what did it
really want to be.
LAWLESS: The costume at first took a while to get the kinks out,
because there would be a lot of boning in the front and you couldn’t
breathe. When those floating ribs can’t move, you can have panic
attacks. I was really embarrassed at first. I was wearing these big,
long bike shorts underneath and then they decided that they had to
get rid of the bike shorts, but it was embarrassing to wear
something that shows so much skin.
O’CONNOR: [I wore] the peasant costume that reminded everyone of
Little House on the Prairie.
TAPERT: Doug Lefler came to me and said, “Hey, this is the object
she should have when we find her in Hercules. This round throwing
object that shocked them — this should be the Warrior Princess’
weapon.”
LAWLESS: Working with the chakram is so easy because it’s magic. You
throw it out one side of the camera, it comes back the other. It’s
so reliable. There’d be loads of b-roll of me dropping it, missing
it. Many chakram bloopers.

And that was also when the birth of Xena’s warrior’s call really
came to life – something Lawless has had to repeat to this day for
fans.
LAWLESS: All the time. It’s so weird that they want that. For a
long time, I wouldn’t and then I just lost. I had to take the path
of least resistance. I remember exactly the moment [it was born]
because there was a TV screen showing Arabic women bemoaning the
death of a young man at a funeral and they were ululating. Rob
Tapert said, “I want Xena to have her own cry just like Tarzan. Can
you do that?” I tried, I toyed around with it. I couldn’t do it, so
I modified it. So the Xena war cry is based on Arabic women
ululating, and it was Rob’s idea. Rob used to watch all the cuts of
every single episode. He’d be playing it at dinnertime and it would
just be so irritating to me to hear my own voice making that bloody
god-awful sound and you’re trying to get dinner ready.

As the show gained stream, the LGBT community quickly recognized the
unique bond between Xena and Gabrielle.
LAWLESS: When we got the faxes of the Village Voice articles sent
over to us — remember there was no Twitter or anything in those days
— Renee and I looked at each other and went, “Lesbians? Really?
Okay.” It was fine with us.
O’CONNOR: I didn’t place much importance around how much of a
profound effect it would have on the community. I really just looked
at: What’s the truth for me as an actress playing this character?
LAWLESS: The name Xena means “stranger.” She felt she was
irredeemable. That friendship between Xena and Gabrielle transmitted
some message of self-worth, deservedness, and honor to people who
felt very marginalized, so it had a lot of resonance in the gay
community. I get a lot of people coming out to me, thanking me for
what I did. I’m completely undeserving of that; we were just jobbing
actors having a great time here at the bottom of the world.
TAPERT: The truth was, and I know it’s such a different era, we
thought we were pushing the boundaries by giving Xena a history of
having men of color in her past. But over time, as these two
characters took on a life of their own, people breathed their own
lives and hopes into them.
LAWLESS: It’s more surprising now, 20 years later. We felt honored
to be part of something that had strength-giving properties to
people, even though it was not specifically our intention.
O’CONNOR: We were surprised at first, but I think that the writing
staff, who were extremely sophisticated and savvy and witty, caught
on much faster than I did.
TAPERT: RJ Stewart, the showrunner, was careful to make sure we
never pandered, because he never wanted to reduce the relationship
or make it seem like the audience was being taken advantage of.
LAWLESS: [Co-EP] Liz Friedman and Rob knew from the start that this
was a natural outcome of having two female action heroes.
TAPERT: Before we started shooting Xena, we shot the material that
we were going to use to create the opening title sequences with. The
studio was so concerned that it would be perceived as a lesbian show
that they would not allow us to have Xena and Gabrielle in the same
frame of the opening titles.
O’CONNOR: We were very aware that there was only so much we could
do, because it was a show on network television. So [while] Rob
would push the envelope as much as he could, he still had to work
within certain guidelines.
LAWLESS: They were together, weren’t they? There was subtext, but
also when Renee went back to Texas, you’d see people go, “What
lesbian subtext? What are you talking about?” and she was like,
“OK…” In the end, it was pretty implicative, not explicative.
Honestly, we didn’t care if they were known to be gay characters.
That’s so not a negative for us.
TAPERT: We didn’t really ever want to get them 100 percent together
for a very strange reason. There was Ares (Kevin Smith), God of War.
We did not want to give up the hold that character had over Xena. So
as much as we liked that Xena and Gabrielle were two people who were
the best of friends, and perhaps intimate friends, we never wanted
to give up Ares.

Part of Xena’s success also came from the producers’ ability to mix
historical and mythical events with abandon, while incorporating
plenty of campiness.
TAPERT: It was campy because we didn’t have enough money to do
things, and we were never afraid to go, “We’re going to tell a story
we can’t afford to,” so the seams were always showing.
LAWLESS: We were cheese, but we were good cheese. Who doesn’t like
good cheese?
O’CONNOR: It was absolutely brilliant of the producers to bring in
an element of levity to almost distract people into watching the
show. You had all these crazy costumes, you had all these crazy
characters and centaurs running around, and it was so absolutely
absurd that you couldn’t help but watch it for a few minutes. And
then if you stayed with the show long enough, you started to see
that there were themes in there that most people could relate to and
were inspired enough to keep watching the series.
TAPERT: We did two different musicals, one kind of liked, one kind
of hated, but I loved both of those.
O’CONNOR: I thought it was entertaining. I cannot sing a note, so
for me it was entertaining.
LAWLESS: It is me singing.
TAPERT: This is going to sound bad, but what allowed Hercules and
Xena to flourish was we were working for Universal in the
syndicated-TV universe. At that time, the TV division went through
rapid changes. We had no parent guarding the liquor cabinet. We
could do any storytelling we wanted. Once in a while they would
weigh in and say, “You can’t do that,” like we had this terribly
gross cesarean birth of a baby centaur from a woman. They said, “The
advertisers will pull out,” and we did it anyways and then they
said, “Oh, M&Ms is pulling out,” and we had to recut. We had an
episode that would have outed Xena and Gabrielle, and they said,
“You just can’t do that, guys,” and we spun it a little differently.
The writers took all week to do a rewrite and changed it, and at
that moment in time, they were probably right for that, so not that
we weren’t willing to go there and had they not checked in, things
would have been different. But there you have it.
LAWLESS: The worst episode was when… we’re being crucified;
completely brutal dead of winter in New Zealand and they’re writing
these crucifixion scenes. It is hands-down my least favorite way to
die. I’ve been crucified several times and it’s never good. It’s
always really windy and really miserable and you’re up hanging from
a cross for hours.
O’CONNOR: We had animals shrinking. We had metaphors around Jesus,
around Caesar. We had Roman battles. We traveled the world into all
these different countries from India to China. There wasn’t a lot
that Rob and his staff didn’t approach.
TAPERT: Season 5 was plagued by learning lessons about life. It was
plagued by a lot of issues, besides the fact that Lucy Lawless was
pregnant and the writer’s office was in a little turmoil and we took
our eyes off the ball. There were some episodes in there that did
not land.
LAWLESS: At times it was uneven. Sometimes things didn’t work, but
it had a lot of heart. The show was greater than the sum of its
parts because of all the love that was poured into it. It was pure
love going into that show. No matter what we did, the acting mantra
was look for the love. Even in a fight; Xena and Gabrielle were
having a fight, look for the love.

With that success came an extreme amount of pressure and notoriety.
LAWLESS: I was really weirded out in the first season when they
were [calling me] “a feminist icon.” Xena was held up as a fat
girl’s Barbie at first and I was like “You’re just objectifying me.”
I had never been described before in print and it horrified me to be
reduced down to a few words, less than a tweet. But now, with the
wisdom of age, I’m like, “Right on!” Now I see the value of it. At
25 and 26, I couldn’t bear to be iconized, because it’s so
reductive.
O’CONNOR: That probably rested on Lucy’s shoulders more than mine.
For me, I really just felt if I could just keep the audience’s eyes
and ears turned to the heart of Gabrielle and let them see what I
see, then I could do the best job possible.

After six seasons and 134 episodes, Xena was canceled, concluding on
June 18, 2001.
LAWLESS: I thought it was the right time. I was struggling through
that last year, because it was relentless. It was nine months a
year. I was out of gas by the end. It kicked my ass.
O’CONNOR: I was ready to take a break. I was ready to move to a
different chapter of my life.
TAPERT: I learned in season 5 that it was going to be ending, and at
that time I thought, “Well, we’re struggling right now in season 5
and maybe it is the right thing to do, and let’s do everything we
can to make season 6 everything we love about the show and
everything it can be.”
O’CONNOR: We went out just at the perfect time, and it doesn’t mean
that I didn’t grieve losing my friends and my sense of family in New
Zealand and living with these two characters, Xena and Gabrielle, in
my life, I surely did. But I don’t regret the timing of when the
show ended at all.
TAPERT: We came up with a great season 6, whether you like how the
series ended or not. I know some fans were disappointed.
O’CONNOR: People actually hate that I loved the ending. I understand
no one wanted to see Xena die. They felt extremely betrayed by the
show to see her die.
LAWLESS: [Xena’s death] is a huge regret on my part, because we
didn’t realize really what it meant to people. We thought, “Oh,
that’s a really strong ending.” Now I just say to fans, “Let’s
pretend that never happened.”
O’CONNOR: Being a storyteller, I felt that it gave the entire show a
sense of purpose because we came right back around and we gave the
exact thing that she needed the most, which is redemption for all
the crimes that she had committed.
TAPERT: Look, we had long conversations about this, RJ and I, and we
thought Xena was guilty and it wasn’t about separating Xena and
Gabrielle, but the funny thing is was we probably underestimated the
backlash.
O’CONNOR: I just felt it was so pure and extremely brave that I
still applaud Rob more than anyone for being so bold.
TAPERT: We thought it was the right thing for a character who had
come from such a violent and lawless past, so that’s why we did it.
There was a bit of selfishness perhaps in closing that door
thoroughly.

Even with the door closed, Xena’s legacy has lived on.
TAPERT: Xena helped open the door and it wasn’t just Xena, because
there was the zeitgeist of female leads on TV shows, and I know it
seems odd, but soon after that the captain on Star Trek was a woman,
and then Buffy followed, and Alias came at the end of Xena, and then
it just was an explosion.
O’CONNOR: It’s amazing to me to see how many actors have the
opportunity to play strong action heroines on television and film. I
can’t say it all came about because of Xena, but I know that Xena
hit the public at a time when it was unique and it really broke the
ground, and she was absolutely cool. Lucy played Xena as if she were
the strongest guy in the room. There were no apologies and that just
created this paradigm for a character that now may take a normal
experience.
LAWLESS: I don’t think that we can take credit for all that much. It
certainly brought that Hong Kong action style, and for the LGBT
community to see themselves on TV or to feel seen and feel visible
on television was certainly new in the ’90s. My goodness, how things
have changed from Xena subtext to I am Cait. That’s an incredible
evolution in 20 years, and I think it’s a really healthy one.

But the door may yet open again: NBC is developing a reboot with
Tapert, executive producer Sam Raimi, and writer Javier Grillo-
Marxuach. But don’t expect to see Lawless and O’Connor on screen.
TAPERT: I think that would do the original performers a disservice.
It’s an advertisers’ and network’s dream: “Oh, yeah, let’s get her
to come back and play the mother. Let’s get them to come back and be
the Oracle.” It’s a different [version]. So no, I’m not a fan of
that.
O’CONNOR: Xena is just an incredible character that it would’ve been
right to bring the show back five years after it ended.
TAPERT: Oddly enough, the world still needs that character, and you
can update the storytelling now so that it is appealing to a new
generation. There’s still the need for that character who speaks to
the disenfranchised, or to people whose lives need a direction, or
they need a little piece of guidance.
LAWLESS: I hope they do right by the fans, do right by the character
and the legacy of the show, but the writer has to be free to do it
in his own voice, so he can’t be held back by too many things. But
there are central characteristics, the cadre of that show is as an
institution that you can’t mess with. There’s what makes Xena, Xena.
She can’t be a woman who’s relying on some dude to get her out of a
fix, obviously, and that’s so passé anyway.
O’CONNOR: What I have heard is that it’ll be more truthful in the
relationship between Xena and Gabrielle in that it will show who
they are and their love for each other in a new way. All I can hope
for is that it keeps the layers to the characters as rich as they
were with the original show in that it’s not just that they’re
partners, it’s that they are everything to each other.
TAPERT: I don’t believe there’s any reason that we couldn’t [include
an LGBT character], meaning it’s a different era. Advertisers won’t
pull out. Storytelling-wise, is that what’s best for the characters?
Did you watch Rizzoli and Isles? I think they did a good job on that
show. The era is now that you can go further and you won’t hurt or
lose audiences, but in Mississippi, probably. It’s early, but the
core of Xena is the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle.
LAWLESS: The world’s still crying out for a hero. There are still
people who feel marginalized, there are still people who want honor
and equality. And that’s what this show is about.


--
Islam is a peaceful religion, just as long as the women are beaten,
the homosexuals slain and the infidels are killed.

[David]

Excellent article. I've read excerpts from it, but not the
entire thing.
Thanks for posting.



"Ubiquitous" wrote in message news:nk8vat$4h4$7...@dont-email.me...