by Sharon Delaney
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 23
Renee and I are rummaging around in the Xena video library again. We're up to episode three, “Dreamworker.” Before we begin, I just had to show her something very strange that came across my email desk. A photo of Brad Pitt from his new movie Troy.
“I thought you might find this interesting. A fan found a publicity photo of Brad Pitt in Troy,” I began and then whispered conspiratorially, “and he’s wearing a Gabrielle outfit.” I held up the picture so she could see it.
Renee looks at the photo. Then holds it closer… and closer, as if she can't believe what she’s seeing. “That's hilarious. God, it looks so much like my outfit!”
“Has the same blue trim around the top section,” I pointed out.
“Yeah. And the boots, like mine - coming only halfway up the calf. That’s what it is too, the boots that don't go all the way up. Makes it seem like Gabrielle,” she said in astonishment. “And the wrap skirt and middle top. How funny!”
We put Brad Pitt away and turned on the clips from “Dreamworker.” It opens with Gabrielle challenging the tree stump.
“Gee, that's a long speech,” Renee chuckled as she listened to Gabrielle natter away.
This episode gave Gabrielle a sizable storyline. And, as I thought back to the first two episodes, Gabrielle was not your usual sidekick relegated to asking the hero questions so the audience would know what the plan was. We were only in episode three and already we’d been introduced to Gabrielle's family, listened to her tell stories, met a boyfriend or two and now they were establishing her “blood innocence” - she had never killed anyone.
“Gabrielle is nothing like Chester on Gunsmoke,” I said.
“I don't remember that show. Did he not speak? Did he just follow the horse?” she chuckled.
“He had a limp,” I explained, “and delivered lines that forwarded the plot.”
“Mind you, I think Gabrielle was always supposed to be the comic relief,” Renee said. “That was her role, originally, like loleus from Hercules. Maybe that's why they wanted to establish the character and let you know who she was, so you'd find her sympathetic. She was a bit annoying, wasn't she?” Renee laughed. “Everyone said, ‘That annoying girl, get rid of her.’”
“The episode after ‘Dreamworker’ was ‘Cradle Of Hope’ and you were very Chester-like in that episode,” I said. “I wondered if you were disappointed after having so much to do in the first three episodes?”
“That was the baby toss episode, wasn’t it?” she asked.
“Yes, it was,” I responded.
Renee thought for a moment. “I definitely remember being in New Zealand and wanting to work more on some of those episodes because my purpose for coming all this way was to perform on Xena. I'd left my family and friends and I was here to work. I definitely wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to fulfill that obligation. But then, later on in the fifth and sixth years, the hours were soooo long, I really had an idea what Lucy had been going through. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I had it easy,’” she laughed. “‘Why didn't I appreciate that?’” She chuckled some more at the memory.
“During the fifth season, Lucy was pregnant. Her hours got shorter and yours longer and longer,” I noted.
“In the beginning of the series, my nickname was Halfday Renee,” Renee remembered with a laugh. “I would go in, work half a day and then get to leave. I had it so good. But, you know me, I always put my head down and get obsessed about what I'm trying to do. I love to become immersed in the world I'm working on and that was Xena. I wanted to be on set. Those were my friends at the time. Those were the only people I knew.”
“It would have been easier as a person, but frustrating as an actor if you'd continued to be Halfday Renee,” I commented.
“Oh yes. yes,” Renee agreed heartily.
“I'm jumping ahead again, but, after the airing of ‘Cradle,’ one fan wrote: Gabrielle was whiny, self-centered, not in tune with what's going on around her,” I reported. “And yet another fan wrote of the same show: The team really began to bloom in this episode. Gabrielle found the palace slave, got the milk, delivered a message to the king without getting caught and kept the baby safe. One viewer liked the character and another didn't.”
Renee nodded her head. “It took a while, through the first year at least, for people to start to appreciate her. I remember hearing that no one liked Gabrielle. I would say up until maybe the last two episodes. Especially the one where Lucy's trying to wake her up from the dead.”
“‘Doctor In The House,’” I added. “Yeah, that started to change people's feelings about her a bit. You realize that Xena loved Gabrielle so I guess then it was okay for everyone else to as well.”
Renee laughed.
“How did you know they didn't like Gabrielle?” I queried. “You’ve mentioned going on the web early in the run of the show.”
“I went on a couple times. But not very often. You just hear stories,” she explained. “No one said, ‘Now, Renee, you're so annoying on the show!’” she laughed easily. “They never said that. I think it was more of how the character was being received. But then, as I've said before, I never thought I would really last past the first season anyway. So it was okay.”
“You've said you thought the character would be dead by the end of the first season,” I said, amazed that such a thing could have even crossed her mind considering how important Gabrielle became to the show and to Xena.
“Well, I did die at the end of the first season, right?” Renee chuckled. “Little did I know Xena would bring me back from the dead. I guess I had no real worry about whether or not the character was going to stay on. I knew I wasn’t the person who had to carry the show. I was dispensable.
“I didn't really know my character was staying until the end of the year when Rob began to talk about the next season. Then I thought, ‘Well, I guess I'm gonna be here, they're writing me in,’” she said cheerily.
“Gonna be Fullday Renee,” I teased.
“Yeah,” she said with a cocky tilt of her head.
“Steve Sears introduced Gabrielle's blood innocence in this episode,” I began. “Did you like that aspect of the character?”
“I didn't analyze it,” Renee answered, “but it made sense for the character because she was young and naive and from a sheltered life. Yet she admired Xena, so it made sense she would start to worry about becoming more like her, especially if she's traveling with her.”
“Steve said he had the option to have Gabrielle kill in that episode and they would have wrapped that up right then,” I told her.
“Thank God he didn't. We got to milk it for five years,” Renee laughed. “I'm fascinated by the writers. How do they decide what issue will come up in a character's life and how to address it. I had no clue what they were going to bring to Gabrielle.”
“Gabrielle wanted to learn how to use weapons,” I said, as we watched Gabrielle practice with the sword. “So the fans were wondering did she want to play with the grownup toys or was there a dark side to Gabrielle coming out?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Renee answered, “I think she wanted to play with the grownup toys. Absolutely. I wanted to play with the toys!” she added with a laugh.
“Xena warned her about the danger of weapons and, the moment she had the opportunity, Gabrielle went and bought the breast dagger,” I said in exasperation.
“It was comic relief. She could play with the toys. Get hurt maybe, but it showed she didn't know what she was doing. She was innocent and needed Xena as a mentor. That’s funny - the breast dagger,” Renee chuckled. Then, as she watched Xena tell Gabrielle the Rules of Survival, she asked, “How old was Lucy then? 26, 27?”
“She was born in 1968,” I said and we did a quick calculation on our fingers and toes and figured out Lucy was 27.
The tape continued and I asked Renee to hit the pause button. I pointed to the screen and asked, “Do you think Gabrielle would have been as innocent as a redhead, the color you are now?”
Renee looked puzzled for a moment and bemused at the question. “I have no idea,” she answered. Then thought for a moment and added, “They needed her to be blonde and light, don't you think? The antithesis of Xena?”
“I was thinking of Vanessa Angel, the actress who almost played Xena,” I explained. “She was a blonde or at least had light hair. They might have made you a redhead for contrast.”
“She was sort of a brownish blonde, wasn’t she?” Renee said, trying to think back. “I wouldn't be surprised if they wouldn't have dyed her hair dark, too. Cause they had this image of who Xena was. Is that right? Or were they going to keep Lucy blonde? I can't remember,” she laughed, getting all confused.
“Lucy had just appeared on an episode of Hercules as a light brownette. She wanted the part and suggested they make her hair darker so she wouldn't look so familiar,” I said.
“That's right," Renee nodded. "I guess if Vanessa had been lighter, they might have gone with a different Gabrielle. Funky hair. Spunky, spikey hair,” she giggled.
“Maybe Gabrielle would have been a fiery redhead!” I said enthusiastically, getting into the rewriting of the show. We both looked at the screen and decided things were just fine the way they were and turned the tape back on.
As these early scenes unfolded before us, Renee leaned back in the chair and said, “Do people still watch these episodes, the early ones?”
“Yeah, they see them on Oxygen. Some people are discovering the show there,” I answered. “And a lot of people who just bought the first season on DVD are sitting down and watching it again.”
Renee sighed. I'm not sure why.
Gabrielle goes into the weapons shop and the proprietor talks about Morpheus. Gabrielle asks, “The God of Dreams?” Renee talks back to the TV. “No, from The Matrix,” she says, laughing. “We just saw the movie and one of the good guys is named Morpheus,” she tells me. “The action is phenomenal! It's amazing. They use a Xena move where Keanu Reeves is on a stick - it's not Xena, it's actually Chinese - and he goes around and around parallel to the ground. They did have this one fight that reminded me of ‘One Against An Army.’ The lead character battling hundreds and hundreds of men.”
“Xena had them coming through one door so it would make some kind of sense,” I said. “Did they do that?”
“No, no. They're multiplying. But that’s what’s interesting about working on Xena. Now, any time I see a show that has action, I can't help but see things we used to do and know how it works. It's like the magic isn't there anymore. You know what I mean?” she said a bit sadly. “Like when you go to a magic show and you know how they do the illusions? That's how I am when I
watch any movies where they have people flying through the air.”
“Everyone else’s jaws are dropping and you’re all nonchalant?” I queried.
“Yeah,” she said, “but I thought Matrix did a good job because they put a different spin on it and created a new sense of style to the tricks you've seen before.”
Gabrielle began to tell Xena about her sixth toe and Renee chimed in, smiling, “You can see a bit of Lucy coming out in lines like that.”
I asked Renee if Steve had ever told her how he came up with that. She said he hadn’t. I told her it was because his father had a sixth toe when he was born.
“Oh my God! That's hilarious!” she laughed. Then said, “I forgot about that. Wow! Isn't it funny how you forget these little pieces about the character after all these years.” She leaned back in the chair still chuckling.
I thought of a question from the fight at the beginning I had forgotten to ask. “When the bad guys come upon Xena and Gabrielle in the beginning, Gabrielle picks up the sword and gives the Xena yell. Did Lucy show you how to do that?” I queried.
“Lucy tried a couple times and I just couldn't pick it up,” Renee said ruefully. “I think it worked that Gabrielle couldn’t do it. You know what I mean? I couldn't do it and she couldn't either and it made it funnier that we were both trying. It wasn't quite right,” she laughed.
“Listening to you now, I don't hear much of a Texas accent. Did you work to get rid of it when you went into show business?” I asked.
“When I went to the High School for Performing Arts, we had a dialect class and you worked on getting rid of your Texas accent if you chose to,” she explained. “We learned the vowels and how to change them. It’s funny because, now that you say that, I've been listening to myself on the show thinking, ‘Wow, I'm really overenunciating all my “t”s.’”'
“What is the accent you have now?” I asked.
“I'm doing Standard American. No, that's not right,” she corrected herself. “Standard American is more rounded, more like an English accent. It's what they try to get Americans to do when they're performing Shakespeare. Not to put on an English accent, but to do Standard American. The vowels are more open.”
“If you had to put on a Texas accent now. would you have to practice it?” I teased.
“No,” she laughed.
“Would you phone home?” I asked, tongue firmly in cheek.
Renee laughed. “It doesn’t take but a second. I can put it on any time. But there are different regions of the South. If I wanted to be from Georgia, then I'd have to play with it. Their vowels are a little more like English vowels which is interesting. Like ‘father.’” She demonstrates saying the word with the Georgian accent and in her regular voice. “The ‘er’ is an ‘a’ at the end. But a Texas accent is so easy - hard ‘r’s.”
“What would a Katy accent sound like?” I asked, naming the Texas town Renee grew up in.
“Small town Texans would say, ‘Change my all.’”
I stared at her not having a clue what she had just said. “Wow, I couldn't even understand that!” I said in amazement.
She repeated it and added to the sentence. “Change my all in my carrr.”
“Oh, oil,” I said, and she laughed.
“It's pretty heavy,” she commented. “What's funny about doing a Texas accent is everyone thinks it has to be pretty severe in order to be from Texas. That would drive me crazy. I would go on an audition for a southern girl and they would tell me my accent was awful. And I would say, ‘You know, it’s not as strong as you think it is.’ Cause unless it sounded really thick, no one believed it!” she said with a bit of exasperation.
“So, the next time I went to an audition, I used my ‘put-on’ hard Texas accent and got the part in The Flood. I thought my accent was horrible! It was so thick! I thought I was over the top. Maybe it wouldn’t be if I lived in Texas, but I've been away for some time now,” she said, thinking out loud.
We were up to the “Bearing children? No way. Look at these hips!” part of the episode and Renee was looking at Gabrielle's shimmery gown.
“I remember that frock. I was so excited to wear it,” she said happily. “Such a beautiful, shiny dress. It was majestic, regal. It definitely looks like (costume designer) Ngila Dickson's style. She loved the princess bustline that cuts right below the breast and then flows down. You see Xena in them all the time when she’s dressing up.”
“This was the first chance you'd gotten to wear something different, wasn't it?” I asked, trying to remember if Gabrielle had worn any other outfits before this episode.
“Yeah. I remember being so excited! Hey! There's a Chinese look to that outfit,” Renee said in amazement. “That's early. I didn't remember that.”
“We’ve done a lot of talking about character motivation,” I began, “and I asked you if, at the beginning, Gabrielle was picking up the sword because she wanted to play with the grownup toys or if we were seeing a glimpse of her dark side. Would that have changed how you'd played the character?”
“If they'd said this is a glimpse of her dark side?” she qualified. “Absolutely, definitely.”
“How?” I asked.
“There’s a motive that is behind every action that shades the tone of the character. It would have changed everything,” she went on. “The way she watches Xena with her weapons, maybe the questions she asked, would all have been very different.”
With the tape running again, we were looking at the scene when Gabrielle gets the three bad guys to fight each other.
“I don't remember this at all!” Renee said, looking at the screen quizzically. “Was this my first fight? There's Mark Harris, one of our stunt coordinators. He was probably doing the stunts with us to make sure we didn't get hurt.”
“Normally he wouldn't have been in the scene?” I asked.
“No,” she said, as a bad guy fell into the fiery pit. “I hate when that happens, falling in crevices with fire, lava,” she laughed. “Oh, she doesn't fight at all, she talks her way out of it. That's right. Does she leap? No, not even that!” Renee laughed even harder.
Then one of the baddies picked Gabrielle up and tossed her over his shoulder.
“I remember that,” she said, leaning forward. “Isn't it funny how you remember certain aspects of a scene. I remember being held near a fire. Something dangerous, that I'd remember.”
“There was real fire in the scene?” I queried.
“Yeah, yeah!” she said, nodding her head. “I'm sure he didn’t get close, but I remember that. I don't remember the scene, but I remember the fire. How funny.” The scene continues and Renee is peering closely at the TV. “Yeah, I'm not very close, but you can’t tell because of the way the camera is set up.”
“The one-eyed camera and its lack of perspective,” I said.
“Right,” she agreed.
Gabrielle punches the bad priest in the nose at the end of the fight.
“Whoa!” Renee chortles with glee.
We come to the end of the episode as Xena and Gabrielle are sitting by the lake waxing philosophical.
“This is tough dialogue,” Renee said, as we sat quietly listening. “It's hard to say because it can be so profound and you have to not put too much into saying it otherwise it becomes silly. You have to be careful of that.”
“It has to sound like two friends…” I began.
“...just talking,” Renee said, finishing my thought. “Xena discovering something about herself and teaching Gabrielle. If you're not careful, it can become like a soapbox.”
As Xena finished speaking, Renee smiled gently and murmured, “I can hear Lucy's New Zealand accent. She's trying to get one of her ‘r’s out. She did such a good job.”
The credits rolled and the next episode came on screen, “Cradle Of Hope.” It opens with Gabrielle waking up after sleeping on rocks all night.
“Sturgatory. This is the same location where the last scene of ‘Dreamworker’ was filmed,” she informs me. “Just the other side of the lake. Turn the camera and it's a whole different place, a whole different country,” she says laughing, “They put those reeds there that Xena and Gabrielle look through to see the baby in the basket in the stream. The way they're looking, the camera's on this side near the water, so they would have pushed us back and added the reeds,” explained Director O'Connor.
As there was very little to talk about concerning this episode, Renee veered off topic. “I ran into Liz Friedman (Xena producer) the other day at the hair salon,” she said. "She looked great. She's been writing for Hack.”
Ah, girlie gossip, what fun. “I saw Bernie Joyce was working on Mister Sterling, but that was cancelled,” I said sadly.
“I didn't see that series,” Renee said.
“I enjoyed it,” I told her, “but I don't know that you would have. You don't like West Wing. You told me you saw a piece of one of the shows and thought it was pretentious. Next day, I read a review of West Wing that said the same thing. What did you find pretentious about it?”
“Sometimes you'll read a play and you get a sense that the writer is trying to be clever or witty. And it can feel forced,” she explains.
“Based on that definition, I'd have to say you're right. Sorkin is trying to be clever and witty. And certainly normal people don’t talk like his characters do,” I added. “But I love the poetry of his words and the moral dilemmas he poses about the political system.”
“I'd like to see the moral dilemmas of running a country. I'll have to give it another go,” Renee said. “Maybe if I knew what to expect when I was turning it on. You know how sometimes you go into a movie and you know what you're going to get. If I had expected that, I would have been ready and focused on listening. But I obviously wasn't interested in listening.”
“No, you turned it off,” I said pouting.
“I did,” she laughed.
“One of the characters, Toby, just had twins. He goes into the hospital viewing room and looks down at the newborns. When he gets back to the office, someone asks him what he’s learned about babies and he responds, ‘They come with hats.’ I thought that was so sweet,” I chortled happily.
Renee's eyebrows shot up. “If Steve said that, I'd probably look at him like, ‘What are you talking about? They come with hats? What about the experience of natural childbirth and seeing your son and the cry?’” she said laughing.
The final scene of “Cradle” was scrolling by and Renee and I looked at each other. “I told you you didn't have much to do in this episode,” I said.
“Lucy and I both agreed, when you don't have much to say, it's harder to stay involved in the action because you have to string together these tiny little thoughts that are sporadic and make them worthwhile,” Renee said thoughtfully. “Lucy has said she finds it hard to stay focused in an episode where she didn’t have something driving her.”
“In the footage I shot of ‘Who's Gurkhan,’ Lucy talks about the filming of the jail scene and that she was pulling faces to try and convey some feelings about what was going on. She couldn't move her body because that would have distracted from the emotional scene Gabrielle and Sarah were having.”
“She was so used to driving the action,” Renee laughed. “It wasn't unusual for me to have a scene without dialogue early on. Those Halfday Renee episodes. I was never disappointed. I just wanted to be on set to do more. Little did I know how easy I had it. I was working out though. I was doing other things. I was running a lot then.
“It's really interesting to see how my body changed when I changed my activities,” Renee chuckled ruefully. “I was running when I had the half days off. I would go and run miles at a time. And then, later on, I think it was during season two, I definitely started to put on more weight. I started weightlifting.”
She continued. “I went to a nutritionist where they would tell you to balance the food with what you’re actually burning. So I would eat more carbs because I was starving after my weightlifting exercises. I was so strong, but I had fat over the muscles from all the carbs.”
“I noticed your forearms looked very strong and your calves,” I commented.
“I was so strong. I was stronger in the second season than I’ve ever been in my life. That's when I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro,” she explained.
“Why did you decide to begin lifting weights?” I asked, puzzled.
Renee giggled. “I started taking this class in New Zealand called Power Pump. It's an elevated form of weightlifting where your heart rate is raised while you're lifting weights. The other women in class would lift these heavy bars. My competitive nature was definitely coming out,” she laughed. “You get in class and there are all these women and they're putting heavy weights on the end of barbells and doing dead lifts. They're doing squats to music and back exercises and biceps and triceps - all these things. It makes you want to increase the weight you're lifting because you see all these other ladies doing it. And they kept encouraging me!”
I looked at her for a minute and then asked, “Were most of them taller than you?”
Renee burst out laughing. “Probably. I just kept thinking if they can lift the weights, so can I!”
“How much did you lift? Were you lifting your own weight? Did you lift 100 pounds?” I kept trying to imagine tiny Renee deadlifting barbells!
“Oh yeah. I'd say so.” She looks at the screen and says, “‘Don't you think so?’ Who am I talking to? Gabrielle?” Renee said, laughing at herself. “Then, of course, I'm hungry, so I’m eating more. It took me a while to figure that out. But I was strong,” she said making a muscle. “I was just fascinated with this class.”
“You get in trouble when you have free time,” I reprimanded, shaking my finger at her schoolmarmishly.
“Yeah,” she giggled. The tape over, I brought up our previous interview when she was taking scene study classes. “Last time we talked, you were Electra and Blanche. Who are you this week?”
“I'm not taking a class right now. Blanche was my last one. I took a break after that,” she said.
“Did you ace 'rage' in Electra?” I queried mischievously.
“Yes. I did!” she said with a smile. “It's funny. You get feedback from Ellen, the teacher, that makes you feel you didn’t quite nail it. What did she say to me? She said I didn't have control of my breath. Which is absolutely true. She asked if I've ever taken singing lessons and suggested I should.” Renee laughed. “She said that would help me learn to control my breathing.”
I started to tell her about taking jazz classes and how firming the muscles in my abdomen helped with my singing and gave me a lot more breath control. When I was done, she said, “I think it's also practicing speaking like you just did right now? How you take one breath and use it for a while.”
“I did just get out a lot of words, didn't I?” I said sheepishly.
“Yeah, there was a lot of dialogue there,” she laughed warmly. “I think that's how you have to practice speaking. That would do it. Singing also helps using the vocal cords. I got the rage, but I didn't have the breath support,” she said, nodding her head. Already I could see her mentally making plans for how she would solve that problem in the future. And with Miles announcing lunchtime in the background, we called it a day.