Dancing Queen
As bad-girl-turned-sidekick to Hercules, Morrigan, Tamara Gorski became a regular fixture in the fifth season of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. K. Stoddard Hayes meets the Canadian dancer and actress, whose fancy footwork enabled her to overcome the eponymous hero.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 12
For many US actors, going to New Zealand to do a guest role on Xena: Warrior Princess or Hercules: The Legendary Journeys is a trip to an exotic locale. For Tamara Gorski, it was more like going home.
A native of Canada, Gorski has done more filming outside the US than in it, working in places as diverse as Paris, London, Hungary, Luxembourg and Zimbabwe. When she first went to New Zealand to film Hercules, she found the territory very similar to Canada, and consequently felt very much at ease there. “I'd been away from Canada for a while,” she recalls. “The light reminded me of Canada a lot. Toronto’s a little like Auckland, Wellington’s a little like Winnipeg, and they’ve got glaciers and we’ve got the North Pole. And the people are so wily and funny.”
Gorski was encouraged to audition for Hercules by friends in Canada who were big fans of the show. When the movie The Hulk, in which she had a role, was put on hold, she had a chance to go for a Hercules audition and won the role of Morrigan after just two try-outs.
“I had no idea what I had gotten myself into,” she reveals. “I didn’t know that it was going to be this big arc from the dark side. I didn’t know that there were going to be heavy, serious acting scenes, the kind that were mostly reserved for Hercules and lolaus. I didn’t know that Hercules hadn't had a girlfriend in a while and that all the women he falls in love with are dead, so the fact that Morrigan is still alive is about the biggest compliment that Rob Tapert could give. I had no idea that lolaus as a character was going to take a serious departure. So they were really thinking of Morrigan as being the sidekick for a while.”
To help her prepare for the role, Gorski says she watched “a little Katherine Hepburn, a lot of Jack Nicholson, and mostly The Empire Strikes Back. The difficult thing is how to deal with being bad,” she says. “It’s like living with a rock in your shoe, and then you take the rock out of your shoe and you can’t walk... You'd think that being good would be easy, but it was actually harder because I was the daughter of the Goddess of War, and by nature I was bad and didn’t know what good was.”
Creating Morrigan’s Irish accent was no problem for Gorski, who has developed a number international accents, including several for Eastern Europe and a Parisian accent for her role in Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris. To make sure it was genuine, the producers hired Irishman Cormac McSweeney to tape record Gorski’s lines so she could mimic his accent, and to work with her during shooting.
“We didn't want a Dublin [accent], we wanted it more northern,” Gorski remembers. “[Universal Studios] said the accent was so dead on that we actually had to flatten it out a little bit.”
Gorski was originally contracted for three episodes, but the producers liked her work so much that she was invited to return on two further occasions, making a total of eight episodes. In those eight episodes, Gorski got the chance to sink her teeth into a great variety of dramatic material, as Goddess of War, desperate mother, lover and psychopath. In her very first episode. Resurrection, she did something no guest character had ever done before: she beat the tar out of Hercules.
“It was a big deal for the fans,” she recalls. “It was a big deal for the people who are in the show, because he’s never had his butt kicked, ever.”
A trained dancer, Gorski has plenty of experience with choreographed fighting, both on stage and on screen. She needed it for the fight sequences in Resurrection, in which camera and visual effects were used to allow Morrigan and Hercules to appear to move at both normal and super speed.
“Most of that was done with green screen,” she says, “and that means you have to have absolute trust in your director. It’s like dance. For me it was easy to comprehend from that kind of a spatial organisation point of view. They planned it out with a storyboard and then they had us on the green screen. It was very choreographed. I had to watch Kevin [Sorbo] on two different monitors. I had to basically dance with him, but he wasn’t there. [I would] run around and duck and then do a kick and a punch at a very specific place in the air, or at an X that was taped to a stick.”
Most of Gorski’s fight sequences were more routine, except for the locales. “You’d wake up at like 4am, get driven to the set on some beautiful beach somewhere in New Zealand, and then take half an hour to change and get your make-up done. And then by 6.30am I’m shaking Peter's [Bell, the Stunt Co-ordinator] hand and he’s showing me the nine guys that I have to fight in the next half hour! One of my first fights was on one of those black sand beaches. It was the last shot of the day and they were running late, and the ocean was coming in and there was smoke and fire and rain. I was walking around with this bowl of boiled eggs [for protein]. I’d be slurping them down and then taking on six guys in a fight that I’d learned only two minutes before! But those shots went into the first set of dailies, and that’s what brought Rob [Tapert] into the trailer to ask if I wanted to do more.”
Gorski enjoyed her fight sequences so much that she was sorry when the fighting decreased in some of her later episodes. The dramatic aspects of the role took much more out of her. Perhaps the most demanding scene was Morrigan’s reunion with her daughter, Brigid (Benedicta Joseph), who is held hostage by the Irish god Kernunnos (Stuart Devenie), in the episode Render Unto Caesar.
“I was singing and crying at the same time, and I was crying through all the takes,” Gorski remembers. “I had a lot of stuff to throw in there, all kinds of thoughts and experiences of my own. I worked myself up and then ended up having to wait, and I had to hold onto it. So that day I didn’t leave my private space until they were ready to roll. That was a really big day.”
She elaborates on her preparation process: “I take my work really seriously, meaning that I do as much homework as possible, especially with television, [where] there’s not a lot of time. You feel and imagine what comes out of the words, and you get there. And for me I just commit, because we only have enough time to block through it and then go. So you’ve got to dig deep; you’ve got to be there.
“It’s like the Olympics in that way - you have only one shot to go for gold, and it takes some time to wind up and wind down. [Some] people who worked very close to me didn’t understand that if I have to cry in an upcoming scene, I’m going to be different than if we’re just getting ready for a fight scene. I’m going to be more quiet or more sensitive, and maybe I won’t want to chat or listen to dance music in a trailer beforehand.”
Shooting the love scene in We’ll Always Have Cyprus was also a memorable experience for Gorski, mainly because of the professionals in charge. “With Garth Maxwell, the director, you can’t go wrong. He’s so brilliant,” she enthuses, “and he has a sensitivity about anything to do with critical moments in a relationship. He's also got the gentlest and most sensitive hand, and when he’s on set it’s like an artist creating.
“There was just a little more body make-up on that day, a little more spray sweat. Garth would talk us through it, say, ‘Now do this; now do that.’ Again, it’s really highly choreographed. Any kind of sex on film is the director’s dance. And we just played. He had it all planned out, and then they shot a lot of the steamy stuff in the second unit with body doubles. I think it kind of depends what shape everyone's in and what people are comfortable with.”
When asked about the role of Norma Bates in For Those of You Just Joining Us, Gorski laughs. “I can't think of anybody more suited to directing me with a bloody cleaver than Bruce Campbell [because of his role in the Evil Dead movies]. That was the first time that we'd met, and from there the torment began! More seriously,” she continues, “Bruce set up some really classic horror scenes. By that point it was my fourth show and I was really kind of exhausted from the whole emotional arc. Up until then it had just been me and Kevin the whole time, [but for this episode] Kevin was there and Renee [O’Connor] was there and Bruce was there and Kevin Smith was there. It was just like a big party. All I had to do was kind of lurk and watch them do their thing.”
Because the Hercules and Xena locations are side by side, Gorski also had the opportunity to get a good look at the Xena crew in action. “I would love to do one of those shows,” she enthuses, “because I heard and saw so much about them. We'd sometimes have lunch together and we could see what 'the other kids' were doing.”
The variety in Gorski's Hercules appearances is a reflection of the variety in her entire professional life. At the time of this conversation, she had just won a role in the upcoming mini-series Haven. Based on a historical memoir, it follows the stories of a group of Eastern European refugees arriving in the US at the end of the Second World War. Gorski plays a young woman who survived the Holocaust, and her co-stars include Natasha Richardson, Anne Bancroft, Amanda Plummer and Henry Czerny. In the past year or so, she has had guest roles on television series such as Angel (as actress Rebecca in the episode Eternity), Earth: Final Conflict, Now and Again and Poltergeist: The Legacy.
A recent first for her was being Assistant Editor for a Learning Channel documentary on aliens and UFOs. Editing is a skill she considers particularly important. “You can make it or break it in editing. There are films that have been solely created in editing, just by taking the couple of seconds before somebody speaks or after they finish speaking, the thoughts that are going through their heads that play through the eyes. On a big screen that’s more important than most lines.”
Gorski has also written and shot an experimental Super 8 film called [SPACE], which appeared on television in Canada and at a film festival in Toronto. She is currently working on a second film, and devoted much off-camera time in New Zealand to shooting footage for it. She and her partner recently pitched a one-hour documentary, and are now adapting a book (the title of which she can't yet reveal) into a screenplay.
With all these different creative endeavours going on, it's no surprise when Gorski finally reveals what she loves doing best: “Making something myself, even if it’s cooking eggs!”
SIDEBAR: The New Girls Speaks
Tamara Gorski on some of the cast and crew of Hercules.
Kevin Sorbo
“You could always tell when Kevin was in a good mood, because he'd start telling his dirty jokes... He says he's a Minnesota high school jock... He's a boy's boy, definitely, but he really runs the show, too. He really has a lot to say about how things should be written and how things should be done.”
Bruce Campbell (director, For Those of You Just Joining Us)
“He gets a lot done, and it's absolutely fascinating to watch him work. He focuses so completely. He says, 'OK gang, this is what we're going to do.' He's got his own film-speak. The crew love it because it's fast and furious.”
Benedicta Joseph (Brigid)
“She was an absolutely perfect four-year-old. She was just really sweet. She wasn't like an actor child, she was a cool little artist, and genuinely cute.”
Mark Beesley (director, Once Upon a Future King)
“He's an excellent rock and roll television director. He was fun to work with. Whenever any questions came up, he would just look at everyone and say, 'What's the show called? Hercules, Hercules, Hercules!. That answers any questions anyone might have.'”