by Sharon Delaney
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 19
They asked three people to do the commentary for the DVD of “Friend In Need” - Lucy, Renee and Rob. But they got a fourth voice for free, Miles William Muir, age: two months. In fact, he's participated in a number of interviews in his young life including this one. He’s a couple days shy of seven months now, but has no qualms about chiming in if he thinks the conversation is getting dull. And he does bring up some important points such as, “Why can't lunch be served promptly at noon?” And, “Does Daddy really think I'm going to sleep when I can play with Mom while she's on the phone?”
As Renee and I start this phone interview, I can hear the young man chortling in the background. “Is that Miles?” I ask Renee.
“Yeah, he’s just a couple days shy of seven months now,” she said.
“And behaving himself perfectly,” I remarked.
“Oof,” she answered.
“Oof?” I queried.
“He just socked me in the face,” Renee laughed. “He's trying to stand on his own. Lost his balance and came flying at me with his fist. This is the first day he's felt really well after being sick for three weeks and he's such a happy boy today. You feel so bad for them when they're small. When they have a cold, you can't reason with them and say, ‘Blow your nose, you'll feel better.’”
“Miles started pre-school recently. I didn't know there was preschool for babies,” I said.
“I think there’s a lot of controversy with how young you should let your baby go to daycare,” Renee explained, “but he's only there for a few hours a couple days a week. For me, I think it's great he can be around other babies - so he can socialize. As much as you can at six months,” she laughed. “It’s just nice to be around different babies.”
“When I grew up,” I said thinking back, “a neighborhood was filled with young couples who all had children about the same age. The houses were right next to each other. The mothers would sit outside while the babies and toddlers played on the lawn near them. It was a built-in pre-school. Many families don’t have that now.”
“No, they don't,” Renee agreed. “And most people are isolated from their family community which is our situation as well. You develop friends who have other children, but, in Miles' case, there aren't that many kids on our street that are his age. The only problem with daycare is if a child is sick. They try to keep them from going to the school then, but sometimes it happens. But they're going to catch things from other children at some point of their school careers.”
“What do they do there?” I queried.
“There are all sorts of toys and the kids sit and play together,” she explained. “At Miles' age, because they're all just starting to sit up, they play with rattles and swap stuff.”
“They swap!” I exclaimed in amazement. “Boy, wouldn’t it be nice if they did that when they got older.”
“When he went today, one child was offering him her cereal. She's about eleven months. The teacher said to her, ‘He doesn't have any teeth yet,’ so she stopped. Then she looked him closely,” Renee laughed. “It’s cute to see him with different people because it's just Steve and I and the same old toys at our house. It's good for Miles to get out and have different stimulants.
“And they do fingerpainting,” Renee continued. “The first day he came home he was covered in green paint! He made an Easter basket for us. It was so cute.”
“You brought him with you when you did the commentary, didn't you?” I queried.
“Yeah,” she said, seeming a bit surprised. “He was really young when we did it and I was worried because he was colicky as an infant. But Rob wanted me to bring him. He said they'd just work around him. When it was time to feed him or if he was crying, I stepped out of the room. When he slept, I'd go back in and they would go back to my scenes. The receptionist was so lovely. She sang Christmas carols to him.”
“It was sweet hearing him in the background,” I assured her. “Made it a family affair; very informal and casual. You guys sounded like you were having a good time.”
“We did,” she said enthusiastically. “Lucy and I were cracking each other up. It's been almost a year. You have a better perspective once the filming of the finale - which was very strenuous in terms of all the hours it took, the night shoots, the weather - is over to see the levity of the whole thing.”
“It was mentioned in the commentary,” I began, “that someone was telling fortunes and ghost stories.”
She thought for a minute. “I vaguely remember the fortune-telling, but more so the ghost stories. We were sitting in a circle at the end of the day - Lucy, Kenji, Glenn (who was doubling for Kenji) and some others. I'm surprised I can't remember the fortune. But when you're pregnant, all you can think about is the baby - what's happening to your body. You forget a lot of things, that's the generosity of mother nature, right?” Renee laughed.
“Like the birth,” I chimed in.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “‘Forget that labor.’ A couple hours after it's over you think, ‘I could do that again.’” She laughed harder.
“Was giving birth what you imagined?” I asked cautiously.
“Steve and I had some birth classes,” she said, “and there are different stages you go through. One part was easier than I thought it would be. The part I thought would be a breeze - the end - turned out to be really difficult. But then he was a large baby. The doctor guessed, after looking at me, the baby would be small,” she laughed. “After it was over I said, ‘What do you mean eight pounds, eight ounces?!’”
“He should have been looking at Steve!” I said.
Renee laughed. “You're right.”
Speaking of names… well, all right, we weren't speaking of names, but I'd been thinking about their naming the baby Miles and I remembered something about Gabrielle’s name from the commentary.
“In behind-the-scenes footage of both ‘Who's Gurkhan’ and ‘Friend In Need,’ I've heard your character's name pronounced ‘Gab-eye-elle,’ I began. Where did that come from?”
Renee laughed. “That was a nickname I got from Ted Raimi. He goes off into these improvisational characters that he makes up and they visit us every time he comes back to set after being in Los Angeles. One of his characters named me 'Gab-eye-elle.' It's like ‘Ren.’ People just make up nicknames.”
“You said in the commentary you felt Gabrielle was more staunch in ‘Friend’ than at any time before. But she was a pretty fierce fighter for the last two years of the series. What made you feel that?” I queried.
Renee thought for a moment. “It was the scene where Gabrielle was getting Xena’s body,” she said. “It wasn't actually the quality of the fight. It was a feeling that she was protecting Xena. I felt incredibly strong and empowered as Gabrielle doing that. Before, I might be fighting with her, but to go and fight for her was something I don't think I'd ever done before. Not in that profound way. ‘Give me her head!’”
“That had to have been a tough line to deliver because it's so melodramatic,” I said.
“Yeah,” she laughed. “But it’s like Greek drama, isn't it? It makes me laugh because, in this Shakespeare class I'm taking, I'm doing a monologue from Cymbeline. It's a lady who wakes up and finds her husband dead and decapitated.
“It's supposed to be funny because the audience realizes it's not really her husband,” Renee continued. “But how would she know? It’s a body dressed in her husband's clothes. Working on the monologue took me back to that scene in ‘Friend.’ How many times does an actor see someone with a decapitated head?” Renee laughed at this strange coincidence in her life.
“Did you know that was in the scene when you picked it?” I asked her.
“No, I chose a different scene from that play,” Renee explained. “But then the teacher suggested that scene. I would never have dreamed of doing it.”
“Does the teacher know you were in Xena and the relevance of that scene?” I asked in astonishment.
“She's aware I was a cast member on the show, but I don’t think she was a fan. She might just have seen a few episodes. She doesn't know all the ins and outs of the characters and their experiences. I don’t think she saw ‘Friend,’” Renee giggled.
“So when you nail that moment in the monologue...” I laughed.
“... she's going to think, ‘You can connect with that pretty well,’” Renee said chuckling. “How wonderful to have been an actor on a show where you had all these elements. Like the rain machine. Even though I hated it, it was just perfect for that moment in ‘Friend.’ I couldn't have been more miserable. It was an awful day - cold, dreary, sterile. It was just great! I was lucky to experience that because it's easy to draw on for other things.”
“Did you take other Shakespeare classes before the one you're in now?” I asked.
“Yes. I decided I wanted to go to a Shakespeare class after Miles was old enough so that I could pick up a hobby,” Renee laughed. “I'd always wanted to do Shakespeare and thought this was a great way to get into it without the pressure of having to perform in a play. I signed up for the Winter Session Shakespeare seminar at Will Geer's Theatricum Botanicum Academy. It was three days a week for five weeks, six or seven hours a day. We worked on fencing, rhetoric, voice and diction, text analysis. It covered everything.
“The Botanicum has been around since the 50s performing Shakespeare under the trees in Topanga, California,” Renee continued. “That's where the essence of the theatre started. Now they have Academy sessions where they bring students in and you work on monologues and scene study. That’s what I joined. For me, it was an introduction to Shakespeare which I needed.
“Although I’ve read some of the more famous plays, I never spent the time analyzing the rhetoric - the use of language. It was wonderful because it makes it so simple. Now I have a way to look at the material so I can understand what the characters are saying. It takes me a long time to read it this way,” Renee chuckled.
“You had fencing classes?” I asked.
“Yes,” Renee laughed. “Isn't that funny?”
“Did your Gabrielle moves come out?” I teased.
“The first thing I wanted to say was, ‘Okay, come and get me!’” Renee said, laughing at herself. “But I was very humbled because it’s extremely different. The stance is different. You almost feel like you're prancing. The instructor was wonderful. The technique is very fast and very precise. Instead of the large movements we used to use for the camera, his moves were small and intricate. I really enjoyed it.
“I was amazed at how heavy the swords are. It’s been a while. I'm out of practice,” she said ruefully.
“And the swords in class are metal, right? Weren't the swords on Xena made of resin with a rod inside so they wouldn't bend?” I asked, thinking back to how the prop man had described the weapons used on the show.
“Right,” Renee said, “but did you ever notice the club Gabrielle has in the fight scene in ‘Amphipolis Under Siege’? She's wacking someone with it and you can see the mallet is bent. During the fight, I was trying to hide that fact. That's all I can remember about that scene. I had no idea what was going on around me. I just had this really rubber-looking thing I was trying to hide.” Renee chuckled at the memory of the recalcitrant club.
“I just love the thought of you in your first fencing class thinking, ‘I'm Gabrielle, I can take you all on!’” I teased.
“I don’t talk about it much, so the instructor had no idea that I had done any work like that at all. I thought it was funny because I was thinking, ‘Sure, I can do this,’” Renee laughed.
“‘This is one class I'm gonna ace,’” I chimed in.
“Yeah, yeah, exactly!” Renee said. “‘The rhetoric I'll have a hard time with, but the fencing I can do.’ But it was completely different.”
“Would we know any of your teachers at the Botanicum?” I asked.
“Armin Shimerman taught text analysis,” Renee responded. “He was wonderful. You'd go up with your monologue and he knew everything about the plays. To make sure we knew what we were talking about, he would have us paraphrase what was written."
“Turn it into modern sentences?” I queried.
“Yes, that's one way to do it,” Renee began. “But he also introduced us to the rhetoric. We would look for the similes and metaphors to find phrases where we could create parenthetical phrases. Meaning, they aren't as important as the verb and the noun which is what you have to punch so people know what's going on. Or, he would explain other words that would create balance with each other and those are the ones that you highlight when you're looking at the metaphor of a phrase. Otherwise, if you stress every single word, people have no idea what you’re talking about even if it sounds great.”
“Does this technique apply as well to modern-day language?” I asked.
“I had a couple auditions right in the middle of the Shakespeare seminar,” Renee began, “and I did try to apply it. But most of the words don't have the descriptive quality that Shakespeare uses. Actually, there was one audition with a wonderful writer who used a lot of run-on sentences. Normally, I would have taken more beats. But I just looked at it as different little paragraphs and tried to create the balance. It’s a tool that, if the writing is there, you can use. And I'm aware of that now.”
After the Academy sessions ended, Renee realized she wanted to do more.
“I loved the classes so much, but I didn't want to take the seminar again,” Renee explained. “It’s so intense. I signed up for a scene study class with a teacher from the seminar that meets once a week for eight weeks. In the Winter Session, she taught rhetoric and scansion.”
“Scansion,” I asked quizically - and ran to the Xenaverse to find out the spelling from the inimitable Mirrordrum, cuz if you can't spell it, you can't look up the spelling in the dictionary!
Renee dived into a mini-lesson in scansion. “Shakespeare wrote mostly in iambic pentameter rather than in prose. She taught us to look for which words are stressed and to use those as clues as to what's important in the delivery. She's so passionate about it and I love that. I really enjoy this stuff. It's probably boring to you.” Renee laughed shyly.
“No, no,” I assured her. “I love listening to you talk about it. Tell me more.”
“Okay,” Renee said. “She showed us that one sentence has a masculine ending because of the way it’s stressed. A different sentence might have a feminine ending, meaning that someone is going through some kind of emotional turmoil and they're trying to push through to get there. So they have this extra beat. Oh. guess what? You're gonna laugh.”
“What, what?” I asked intrigued.
“Guess who's in my class?” she asked in her best quiz master voice. “It's someone who's been on Xena. I saw her and it took me a second to remember who she was. I didn't recognize her out of character. Her name is Jenya Lano. She was in ‘Succession.’”
“Mavican?” I asked incredulously. “Mavican is in your Shakespeare class?”
“Yes,” Renee said gleefully. “She's really lovely and has great presence. She's very simple, doesn't try to push too hard in her work. Did you know that English is her third language?”
“What are the other two?” I asked.
“She's Russian and speaks Italian,” Renee said. “She's finding Shakespeare difficult because it's her third language.”
“English is her third language,” I remarked. “Shakespeare will be her fourth.”
Renee laughed. “There ya go.”
I wondered what pieces Renee had been doing for the scene study classes.
“I worked on the character of Portia from The Merchant of Venice before,” Renee stated. “Also Olivia from Twelfth Night. She's hilarious. Now I’m working on Imogen in Cymbeline and Rosalind in As You Like It.
“Rosalind is great,” Renee said enthusiastically. “There are so few female characters in Shakespeare's works, but this is one who is so savvy. And, unlike the other characters I've been working with, she speaks mostly in prose. It seems so natural compared to the rhythm of modern-day language.”
Thinking about how the classes were structured, I wondered, “If you’re working on a scene, does it have to be a monologue or are you working with another person?"
“The instructor pairs you off with someone,” Renee explained. “I'm working with a woman named Stephanie who's playing Celia, Rosalind's cousin. She's lovely and looks like a very young Juliet. We’re doing Scene 3.2 in As You Like It. It's a comedy and we're in the forest together. Celia is reading a poem she found written by a man I love, but I don't realize he wrote it. And the poem is godawful.” Renee laughed. “I'm having a ball. It's nice to do something different. I'm hoping one day I can share all this with Miles.”
“When you do scene studies, would it be different for TV than for a play? Does it affect the character or the style in which you work?” I asked.
“It affects the style,” Renee stated. “Shakespeare's writing is so stylized, so heightened, it's very easy to be theatrical with it. But you still want to be connected with what's going on and not become presentational. You don't want to do that because all of Shakespeare's stories revolve around such wonderful human issues. I guess it comes down to the size of the room you're including - the audience. If it's just the camera, you're right there with them. But you need to reach out further on stage and bring the 300 people in the back row into the story with you.”
I remembered once, during a convention, we were filming Lucy back- stage. We had a lighting setup. She was sitting looking straight at me and before we started filming she said, “That key light is wrong.” I mentioned this to Renee and added, “She didn't look at it. Someone gave it a tweak and she said, ‘That's right.’ When/how does an actor learn things like that?”
She laughed at first at Lucy being able to tell the difference. “I wouldn’t have had any idea,” she said. “I think it's that the whole idea is for people to hear the words and to be taken on a voyage, but if they can't see or hear you, how can they possibly be affected by what’s happening. Maybe that’s when the actor learns to find the light on a stage or set. You're the medium for the words and people have to see you in order for that to happen.”
“If an actor on Xena played a scene differently from the way you had envisioned it. the way you had prepared for it, how do you work that out?” I queried.
Renee thought for a moment and then responded, “I think it depends on the situation and what the director wants. Because some directors might want to throw you as an actor. I think you have to work with what the other person is presenting. But if you were rehearsing for a play, you could go through that part of the scene and try a different way the next time. These are all layers you then put into the final performance. What made you ask that?”
“I was thinking of an interview I did with Rob when he directed ‘Paradise Found,’” I told her. “He said he asked you to do the scene on the bed when Gabrielle is talking with Xena in a totally different way than you had prepared to do it.”
“That's the scene I was thinking about, too, when you asked the question,” she laughed. “That's why I said it depends on the director.”
“Did that ever happen with you and Lucy?” I continued.
“We worked off each other,” Renee explained. “If someone does something you aren't expecting, you just react to that. Yes, I would always have an idea of what I thought the character would be doing, but then you have to let that go when your partner does something different.”
“And the more you work with someone, the more you adapt to each other and you might not even realize you're doing it,” I added.
“Right,” she agreed. “The first couple years you’re creating a history with the characters so I probably prepared a lot more than I had to by the sixth year.”
“You've spent six years thinking about Gabrielle,” I began. “Is she real to you?”
“Yeah, I think it was really hard for me to distinguish between Gabrielle versus myself - especially toward the end.” Renee laughed. “There were times I could relate to her and times when I was just on a different path completely. For example, I felt more mature than she did. But now that the show's over, Gabrielle's so different from me.
“It's really interesting. It's probably going to take me another year just to figure out who I am and what I like. How she’s influenced me but yet she's not me obviously. I think I'm definitely a stronger person because of the show and because of playing Gabrielle. I feel more empowered as a whole. ‘You don't take shit!’” She laughed.
“Yeah, not those two characters,” I laughed.
She thought some more. “Before, I was probably a pushover. I have that quality about me. I like people to like me. It's that whole thing of wanting to be accepted. But I know when enough is enough. We're social creatures. We want to belong. It's only negative when you lose your own integrity or dignity.”
“When you allow yourself to be walked over,” I agreed.
“It's so sad, when someone lets that happen, because we're all so special,” Renee said sadly and then chuckled. “Now that I'm a mom, sometimes I see people and I can imagine them as children. It's the weirdest thing.”
“You see them as children?” I asked quizzically.
“I look for a vulnerability and a childlike essence in them that maybe you don't see because some people are cynical with what's going on in the world,” she explained. “We're all so unique and special, what a shame we don't, sometimes, have respect for ourselves.”
“How do you go about adding to what's on the page when you approach a character?” I asked.
“You look for clues in the writing,” Renee began. “For instance, the character of Tataka in ‘Devi.’ I once talked about her being vain. I picked up that she loved adoration. She was supposed to be a benevolent god, but we knew that wasn't the case. And I thought, ‘Why? What is it about her that is her vice?’ That's what I started to look for. I decided she was extremely vain and had a big ego.”
“I've often heard actors say you need to humanize a villain,” I said. “For me, Denzel Washington did that in Training Day.”
“Right,” she agreed. “You cared about his character. I did, at least in the beginning. You can understand his point of view. To me, that's brilliant because that's the human side of the character. Suddenly, then, at the end, you go, ‘Oh, hang on, he's crossed the line and he's taking me with him!’ It's wonderful when an actor can do that.”
We were just about out of time and young Miles was making “Where's my lunch?” noises. Renee's first appearance since finishing Xena was a performance of Love Letters at our recent Pasadena convention. When Renee arrived, she was a redhead!
“You changed your hair color?” I asked.
“Why did I?” she mused to herself. “I've always loved redheads and I wanted to reinvent myself. I have been red before - maybe not this dark. I think I'll always play with red and blonde.”
There was one last thing I wanted to tell Renee. “I talked with Lucy last Tuesday and it came up that when people ask me what Lucy's really like, I list a few things and then I say she's also kind of loopy.”
Renee burst out laughing.
“She didn't seem offended and I said she’s like Meg. Meg's loopy,” I explained. “Meg gets this look on her face and her elbows go out. It's a goofy sense of humor that Lucy also has that's unexpected…”
“... because she's so strikingly beautiful,” Renee chimed in. “You wouldn’t expect that from someone who looks the way Lucy does. She looks like a femme fatale and to be goofy and loopy really throws you.”
“Lucy says she misses Meg,” I added. “She'd like to try and find a way to have Meg live in another character someday.”
“I've thought about that Indiana Jones character I played in ‘The Xena Scrolls’ - Janice Covington,” Renee reminisced. “I only touched the surface of her. I'd like to do her again, like Lucy said, within a different character. There was something about her I just loved. She was so much fun.”
“You liked cracking that whip, didn't you?” I teased.
“Yeah!” Renee laughed. “‘That's no way to treat a lady.’”