by Sharon Delaney
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 04
The phone rings and the voice on the other end asks for Sharon. As I’m home on a workday and there’s only one person who would be phoning me, I devilishly wonder if I should pretend to be part of a large family and make Renee wade through my non-existent relatives before I fess up I’m the only one here. I don’t know which weighs heavier on my mind - the fact that I always, always get caught if I try to lie or the image that forms in my mind of the size of Renee’s phone bill calling me from New Zealand if I don’t tell her who I am ASAP!
“It’s me, Renee,” I respond. “I’m the only one here. You can’t get anyone else. Aren’t you glad I don’t have seven kids? You could work your way through the whole family until you found me.”
“Oh no!” she laughs easily. “That happens when I call my aunts and uncles.”
I inform her I’ve been sitting here watching “Fins, Femmes and Gems” and laughing my head off while I wait for her call. “I love that song you sang, but the words are different than the ones in the script.”
“Josh Becker, our director, and I both decided to work on the song because it wasn’t rhyming,” she explained. “He came up with the version you heard on the show the night before we shot it. I thought it was pretty good!” she said, clearly grinning gleefully.
“And we got to hear Renee O’Connor sing live!” I added.
“Oh yeah, exciting,” she said, laughing. “I was just a one-take wonder.”
“You just got back from the U.S. and Lucy’s wedding?” I asked her.
“Yeah. She was absolutely gorgeous. I haven’t seen her yet. I’ll have to ask her how the honeymoon went,” she grinned.
“Getting married is not something I’ve done yet and I’m curious if it feels different,” I said.
“Yeah! I don’t know. Let’s ask her!” she said, enthusiastically. “I’m like you, I have no experience in that whatsoever.”
“Although you might,” I teased.
“You never know,” she said. And I could picture the twinkle in her eyes.
“I’ve got a whole slew of episodes I’d like to run through and I thought I’d do them in order, but first, someone wrote on the web, ‘I would have given a week’s pay to see the look on Renee’s face when she read the script for ‘The Quill is Mightier’, and got to the part about three naked dancing Gabrielles.’”
“I think my mouth dropped. Everything Rob (Tapert) throws at me I tend to crack up laughing, because it’s probably the furthest thing from my mind. He’s so funny. He’d warned me that he was going to try to make Gabrielle sexier and that’s all he said. Little did I know that I’d be on the set with three naked dancing Gabrielles following me around,” she laughed.
“All you could think of was, ‘Bring on the stunt doubles,’ right?”
“Yeah, three body doubles. It got pretty hilarious because there was a body double, the three ‘naked’ Gabrielles and me. It was the most bizarre episode, but it was so funny. I remember when I started to work on Xena. I was embarrassed about having to get into a bathing suit and now the outfits are getting smaller and smaller,” she laughed.
“You wouldn’t be referring to Gabrielle’s third season outfit, would you?” I asked. “I wondered about that line in ‘Forget Me Not,’ that went, ‘This thing keeps shrinking. Is it enchanted?’”
“It was a wink to the audience,” she said.
“Another fan favorite moment in ‘Quill’ was seeing the sword bounce off Gab’s Abs,” I told her. “If Gabrielle’s outfit ever got a middle piece, do you think you would be in as good shape as you are now?”
“Oh, probably not. When you put that outfit on, you just have to suck everything in, you know?” she laughed.
I pulled over my notes about the episodes and started with “The Debt.” In “Forget Me Not,” we learned that Gabrielle betrayed Xena out of jealousy, not because she was trying to save Xena’s soul. And R.J. Stewart (who wrote the teleplay for “The Debt”) said that was what he was thinking when he wrote it. But no explanation was in the script. Did she know that when she was filming “The Debt?”
“I had no idea,” she responded. “He didn’t share that with me. It’s funny because I’ve always thought Gabrielle tries to look for the best in people and to act on behalf of others and not selfishly. So when this came around, it was a big blow to me looking at Gabrielle in a whole new light. I realized that the writers are going to create situations where Gabrielle will make a lot of mistakes, but hopefully she’ll grow from them and be a better person and a better friend.”
“Lucy said at the last convention that sometimes she has to realize she can’t keep protecting her character,” I told her.
“Exactly. Lucy told me that about ‘Forget’ in particular,” Renee said. “I really had a hard time with it because I thought that it was the ultimate betrayal. That there was no dignity in the fact that Gabrielle betrayed Xena for selfish reasons because she was jealous.”
“You had difficulty in ‘Forget,’ but not ‘Debt?’” I asked.
“I had no trouble with what Gabrielle did in ‘The Debt,’” she stated firmly, “because I thought Gabrielle was justified. She was trying to save Xena’s soul and also trying to save Ming T’ien from execution. I believed wholeheartedly in what she was doing.”
“You talked with Lucy about the problems you were having with ‘Forget’?”
“She said some of the best experiences she’s had on the show are the times she let the character go and didn’t try to protect her. So I kept that in mind,” she said. “It was quite a stretch for me as Gabrielle. And I still don’t know if I believe completely in my performance. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen traces of myself more so than Gabrielle.”
I told her, “After watching ‘Forget,’ I looked at ‘One Against An Army’ again and saw the hug at the end of that show (just before Xena’s big battle), in a different light. I wondered if Gabrielle was holding back her feelings. We know from watching the series that you and Lucy are extremely capable of registering strong, loving emotion. Yet you seemed totally dry-eyed and almost stoic considering the characters were very probably saying their last good-bye.”
“I believe, with that episode in particular, that Gabrielle had come full circle of knowing they were both going to die,” she explained. “And, at that point, tears weren’t necessary because they were going to see each other in another world. Gabrielle had come to terms knowing she was going to die and Xena had accepted that that was her fate as well. There was no point in being sad. It’s more poignant than tearful.”
“Might you have had a discussion with yourself about whether or not tears were called for in that scene?” I wondered.
“You know,” she laughed, “with Lucy and I, as you said, the tears just come. I have to trust that if they’re meant to be, they will happen and that just wasn’t the case at that time.”
“I’m fascinated by the fact you have an exquisite knack for bursting into tears and then stopping them,” I pointed out. “We’ve seen it in the dungeon scene in “The Debt” and also in “The Quest” when Xena appears to you.”
“It’s actually easier for me to hold back tears than it is to let them go. It takes a lot for me to let it go like that and as soon as I get there, I usually try to pull it back and bring it in a bit. I think it’s typical that people try not to cry because it’s so vulnerable, but there are certain times with Gabrielle that she just speaks through her heart. She can be very expressive and it’s not necessary for her to let it all go. If I can get to that point…”
“If you’re shooting a scene like that and doing take after take, you must have to keep bringing up the emotion again and again,” I said.
“If I’m lucky, we’ll get it right away and I won’t have to do it again. Occasionally things will go wrong, maybe technically, and I’ll just have to maintain it. I have control,” she laughed, “but not as much as you’d think. It’s mostly luck. I just try to hang on.”
“You’re talking about bringing up emotions,” I said, “and I remember Lucy said that at the end of ‘Is There A Doctor In The House?’ she had to redo the scene of bringing Gabrielle back from the dead and she said, ‘I can’t.’ She mentioned that you helped her bring the feeling up again.”
“Lucy’s always so reliable. I think her emotions are more on the surface,” she pointed out. “She can draw on them immediately. I think Lucy was fighting against losing her character in a sentimental way. She was trying hard to keep Xena the reluctant hero. I think that was battling within her. It’s hard if you don’t completely commit to something to act it out. It might have come the first time because she was feeling everything in the moment, but then the logical side of her starts questioning, ‘Is this right for the character?’ I remember saying, ‘This is your best friend dying.’ You can’t help but feel sad. That’s such a significant moment in someone’s life. I don’t know if it helped her or not.”
“She said Renee told me I could do it and I did,” I told her. “And thinking back on that episode, that was the first time we’d ever seen that character totally dissolve. Xena had never quite given away that much before.”
“Exactly,” Renee said. “She was worried about that, but she let it go and look how far she’s come.”
“I read something interesting on the net and I wondered what your response would be,” I said. “Someone wrote that Gabrielle’s purity and trust is the reason why all this hell is breaking loose. How will she ever be trusting and loving again after she gives out this love and trust to the world and all she gets back is pain and anguish. Her own goodness, everything she believed in, has betrayed her.”
“I think that Xena’s actually the one that keeps trusting Gabrielle in spite of all she’s done,” she stated. “Gabrielle betrayed her best friend and then there’s Hope. I feel it’s Xena who’s more of the heroic figure in allowing to forgive and forget and move on. And I don’t see Gabrielle as a victim. I think that because she’s traveling with a warrior woman, she’s affected by everything and she’s becoming more rational in her thinking. She’s not the naive little girl anymore. She can look at someone like Ming T’ien and say this man is evil and he should die for the greater good. And I think she’s learned that from Xena.”
I told Renee what Steve Sears had said when I interviewed him about Gabrielle in “When In Rome”: “Xena has been the most important catalyst in Gabrielle’s life and Gabrielle could not have stayed the way she was when she left Poteidaia. At one point, Gabrielle did have a very black and white view of the world. This line is really muddied now. And it became muddied when she became part of the black side, when she killed for the first time.”
She responded: “I still think that the whole struggle with Gabrielle is that she’s trying to be the good person who will not kill. Traveling with a warrior has changed her perception of the world and that’s going to be her constant struggle. Do some people deserve to die and deserve to be punished for their sins? She’s starting to believe in capital punishment a little bit here.”
“Do you think Gabrielle would have tried to save Hitler?” I asked her.
“Well, you know,” she said, “in the beginning I would have said she would have found a way to redeem him, but now, after everything she’s been through, I would have to question whether or not she would. How could she when she sees so many people being murdered? The role of Xena is the reluctant hero who is fighting for good against her instincts where Gabrielle’s the opposite. She’s a person who wants to fight for good, yet she is realizing there are certain people that shouldn’t be fought for. I think the episode of ‘When In Rome’ where Gabrielle allows Crassus to die is a turning point in her character.”
“I asked R.J. to talk about Gabrielle for the last newsletter and I wondered if you’re aware how much he loves the character of Gabrielle?” I asked.
“He’s great. I have such deep affection for him,” she said, with a soft smile in her voice. “Every time I see him I just want to hug him because obviously Gabrielle is very dear to me and I know that he created her. He cares so much for her that I feel that way about him as well.”
“He said you call him up sometimes?” I queried.
“Yeah. I was really worried about ‘Forgiven.’ I was trying to control Gabrielle again. Worried about letting her go, that she wasn’t dignified and being a bitch,” she laughed.
“The beginning where Gabrielle was complaining about Tara following her and Xena?” I asked.
“I thought that Gabrielle’s always the one that does look for forgiveness in people and tries to find a way to do that and this was one episode where Gabrielle couldn’t find forgiveness in herself anywhere!” she laughed, wryly.
“And Tara was just a teenager,” I added.
“A young girl! I found it really hard to believe that Gabrielle wouldn’t forgive and forget this one little girl who was just mislead. So I called R.J. and told him I didn’t know what to do. We talked about it and he changed some things and made Gabrielle more sympathetic which worked. And then he said, ‘You know, Renee, this girl has bitten off Gabrielle’s ear! Surely there’s a place in Gabrielle where her pride is hurt.’ He said that’s a very human emotion and he was right! I’ve just never thought of Gabrielle like that. It was really great for me to do it because it was very human.”
“You remember the campfire scene when Tara took Gabrielle’s place next to Xena as they were laying their bedrolls out for the night. If that scene had been earlier, it could have been the start of the build-up of Gabrielle’s jealousy,” I thought out loud.
“That’s possible,” she agreed. “Xena was allowing this little girl to become her new sidekick after she already beaten Gabrielle up. That’s what the jealousy stemmed from. When I finally stopped protecting Gabrielle, it was great to play. It’s so hard for me sometimes to relate to Gabrielle because most of the things that happen to her are so fantastic that they don’t happen in my own life. Something like jealousy which is a natural, human emotion, I relate to much easier. It was really interesting that when I started looking for it in my own life and found it, it was so easy to play the character because then I completely understood what she was going through. Whereas, at other times, I really have to search to understand. For instance, how do you play someone having a demon child?!” she laughed.
“You mean there’s no one in your circle of friends who could say, “Well, let me tell you how it was,” I said, devilishly.
“Let’s talk about ‘Maternal Instincts,’” I proposed. “One of the scenes that registered the most with viewers was Gabrielle almost taking the poison - what was taking place, the lighting, the look on your face. Comment?”
“The way I looked at that scene, she was obviously dealing with the loss of her child and having to do this terrible thing to Hope,” she said at first. “But then, beyond that, when it came time to drink the poison, I decided to play that Gabrielle was too afraid to take her own life.”
“Is that what you were thinking?” I ask, amazed.
“Yes, I thought that’s the most human thing she could feel. Even though they weren’t shooting Lucy, she was there when we were filming this. I remember looking at her when we were filming this. I remember looking at her and seeing the sheer disappointment and disgust Xena had for Gabrielle. It really hit me and I thought, ‘Oh God, what a situation I’ve gotten myself into.’ I looked over and Xena is standing there watching Gabrielle. So I just assume that Gabrielle knows that Xena saw what she’d done.”
“You feel Xena was disappointed that Gabrielle didn’t kill herself?”
“I don’t mean it like that,” Renee explained. “But I think that Gabrielle has brought all this upon herself by not killing this evil child to begin with, right? It was her lack of judgment. Gabrielle was basically at fault. And not to at least be courageous enough to stand up for her wrongs - she is less heroic. D’you know what I mean? She wasn’t courageous enough to do it. It was my perception that Xena thought Gabrielle should be stronger.”
“And that was a different Xena - a Xena filled with hatred,” I added. “I asked Chris Manheim (who wrote this episode) who Xena was crying for at the end - only the loss of her song or also the loss of Gabrielle?”
“That was a great performance by Lucy because you do wonder,” she said. “Even to myself while I was watching I thought you could see it was a total loss in her life.”
“You just said it was Gabrielle’s lack of judgment in not killing Hope.” I reiterated. “As opposed to the love for her child and the belief that that child might be good?”
“I’m saying that now because I’ve already come full circle with Hope and Gabrielle knows that Hope is an evil being, unfortunately,” she laughed.
“And I haven’t seen ‘Sacrifice’ yet. So no spoilers, please,” I protested.
“Okay,” she laughed. “But even before, by poisoning her child she had come to accept that Hope is evil and has to die. That’s what Gabrielle came to at the end of ‘Maternal.’”
“She should have believed Xena?”
“She should have believed Xena to begin with and it would have saved a lot of lives. It would have saved Solan’s life.”
I sighed. “But then we wouldn’t have had such a great episode.”
Renee laughed. “Exactly.”
“And,” I said stubbornly, “the bottom line is, it’s not that Gabrielle didn’t believe Xena, it’s that the writers didn’t allow her to!”
“There ya go,” she said. (Sounding suspiciously like her mother, who uses that phrase all the time.)
It was now time for “The Bitter Suite” and I decided to dive right in and bring up the opening of the episode where Gabrielle is dragged by Xena in a fit of rage across quite a large expanse of territory. I told Renee fans had been calling it the Gabdrag and that I had, in the last newsletter, asked everyone involved in the making of that episode to comment on it, including Rob. Did she want to hear what other people said first or tell me what she thought first?
“The Gabdrag?!” she laughed, astounded at the nickname. “I’ll answer first, then I’d love to hear what other people said. We had filmed the end first - the cliff scene. So we did postdrag before I saw what they were doing to do with the character. If I’d only known they were going to drag Gabrielle through fire and mud and grass, we probably would have changed the makeup a bit more. It was so horrific, it was hilarious, you know what I mean?
“I went through a fire! It was bizarre. I think it was second unit having a good old time,” she laughed. “I think there are times you wonder if Gabrielle could have survived it at all. I would have been dead! That’s why I probably would have played it a lot differently. I couldn’t have stood up, much less have woken easily. It was horrific to the point of being hilarious because it was so far-fetched.
“It was such an amazing episode, but I wondered after seeing the completed version, if anyone had turned on the show for the first time, would they have even cared about the characters because we relied a lot on the back story.”
I doubted a first-timer would have understood the whys of the episode, but some of the scenes were so emotional, they stood on their own. I mentioned that moment when Gabrielle pulled Xena through the veil of water. It was another one of those times when Gabrielle dissolved into tears only to stop herself from letting go entirely.
“I was so moved by the song that Lucy was singing - everyone on the set was choking up,” she explained. “I was there when she shot the song. We were together throughout most of the musical as long as we were in the same scene together. The only time we weren’t was for the close-ups during the ‘I’m Hurting’ song. It was a pickup shot and Lucy and I did them on separate days.”
“This is when you were spread-eagled on the table and she was on the cross?” I asked.
“Exactly. We were together for the wide master shot of that scene, so we had a feeling of what was going to happen. And it’s such a beautiful song. It was quite easy to be moved by it. But, when we did the close-ups, there’s so much history in the relationship that we didn’t need to be together. It was more about the profound love Xena and Gabrielle have for each other as opposed to needing to see or work off the other person’s performance.”
“You said last time we talked that you sang full out during some of the filming even though your voice was going to be dubbed,” I mentioned.
She laughed. “The song where we were in the Chamber of Echoes, I was really singing my heart out. Gabrielle was just so angry and I yelled through it. But the other one was a quiet moment and I sang to myself.”
“‘One Against An Army’ - the most touching moment for me was when Gabrielle stroked Xena’s hair as she was sleeping,” I told her.
Renee reminisced. “I remember wanting to remember one last thing about her in case Gabrielle didn’t live through the night. And I remember thinking she’s such a beautiful woman.”
I’m well aware that stunt doubles do all the dangerous stuff, but the doubles on Xena are so good, I actually thought Lucy might have carried Renee in that scene where Xena carried Gabrielle up a ladder into the loft.
“No, she didn’t,” she said. “Lucy and I were both invalids on set. Lucy was suffering from a twisted knee and I had a sprained ankle. It was quite bizarre actually. It happened when the soldier came down through the roof to slice Xena’s throat. It’s a terrible image to begin with and my foot was a little bit out of position. The stunt man jumped down off a box and… He’s quite the big man and we were still shooting so I had to shut up and not say anything. I didn’t tell anyone until later and then we just bound the ankle.
“What was bizarre was that a couple of days later, this same stunt man was doing the exact same stunt and he broke his leg in two places! Everyone was giving me a hard time saying I jinxed him,” she laughed.
“You had a voodoo doll at home?” I teased.
“Exactly,” she laughed. “And it was even funnier because of that Xena doll I had in the beginning of the episode. I made that,” she said, proudly.
“I wondered where that came from. It wasn’t in the script,” I told her. “The first Toothpick Xena Action Figure. Why did you make it?”
“Our stunt coordinator, Peter Bell, whenever he’s explaining a fight to Lucy, he has two little action figures he uses to show the flips and how they rotate around each other,” she explained. “It just cracks me up because he’s such a staunch man to be using these little dolls. It’s hilarious. So I made the doll in tribute to him and was playing with it. It was an inside joke.”
“Where did you find the makings?” I wondered.
“I made it while I was hanging around on set one day. Stuff from the wardrobe department and a couple of toothpicks from makeup. It was Lucy’s stash, I think. And I used horsehair for her black wig.” Renee is reciting this tale and unabashed glee and pride of accomplishment. And deservedly so.
Now comes the episode, “Forgiven,” wherein Gabrielle invents Charades. This is the Xenaverse after all and Xena has already invented bungee-jumping and the kite. It was Gabrielle’s turn.
She laughingly said, “I thought that was very clever of R.J. It was fun. You feel like a complete idiot doing it so you just have to let it go. I was trying my hardest to come up with something different each time to make Lucy and Shiri (Tara) laugh. So I kept getting more and more bizarre and over the top.”
“When In Rome” - this episode had Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Vercinix, and yet it seemed to be Gabrielle’s story.
“It was a big turning point for Gabrielle and I was quite surprised they were going to do it. I never really know what they have in mind for her,” she said, amazed. “But it’s good. As Gabrielle gets older, she can’t be naive anymore. And she had just been burned by Ming T’ien. I remember wanting the audience to question whether or not we were going to go through the same situation as in ‘The Debt.’ Whether Gabrielle would betray her best friend again for the sake of someone else. I wanted to go through that struggle until the very end when she realizes Crassus has lied to her and that he basically deserves to die. It was a great experience for Gabrielle. I really believe it made her a stronger person.”
I asked her if she thought that when Gabrielle started out she was following Xena and she just can’t blindly follow her anymore? She’s now got her own ideas and she’s got to decide what’s right for her.
She thought about this and said, “I think Gabrielle was following her own ideals before. Through ‘The Debt,’ she was definitely more of her own person and had her own identity. As time has moved on, she’s coming to see more of the world as Xena does. I think she’s a little more objective in seeing people for what they truly are now. Xena’s always pragmatic and Gabrielle is starting to appreciate that more.
“Even though, in ‘The Debt,’ she was jealous and betrayed her best friend, she was still trying to right for her ideals that no one should be executed. She was standing up for what she believed in. Now, she’s trying to learn more from Xena.”
It was time for a discussion of this season’s clip show, “Forget Me Not,” Renee gets to have such fun when Lucy’s not around. She played in water, blood, fire - and got to let out a bloodcurdling scream.
“What do you mean one!” she exclaimed, indignantly.
Oops - actually heaps of bloodcurdling screams. I sensed a warped feeling of pride in this newly acquired skill that she first attempted in “The Deliverer.” She’s obviously gone from being awestruck by the impressive volume this vertically-challenged native Texan turned out to be capable of producing to carving notches on Gabrielle’s staff whenever she lets loose with a good one.
“That’s probably the hardest episode to date that I’ve had to do. It was the most emotionally charged and physically demanding because Lucy wasn’t there to balance the workload. It was a great experience, though. Everything that has happened after that where we’re in situations that are a bit uncomfortable. I just remember doing ‘Forget’ and…” she said.
“Did they use real ice when you were in the frozen river?” I queried.
“The river of fire was freezing water with dry ice and pipes of flames. And the river of ice was actually a sauna,” she said, ironically.
I told her, under the circumstances, her shivering was admirable.
“Thank God I had just seen Titanic,” she laughed.
“They use real fire?”
“They do, yeah. But they’re very careful about my safety and they make sure you’re comfortable. There are times when you can feel the heat on your skin which helped me in that scene where I was screaming. It’s quite easy to imagine your skin shriveling under it.”
I heard the ticking of the clock and had one last question. If Renee moved into a town where Xena and Gabrielle lived, who would she be friends with?
This elicited a surprised burst of laughter. I think I asked her a totally unexpected question.
“I’d probably be friends with Xena. I like her character, her coolness, and her spunk,” she said, without even stopping to think.
Is it just me or does this sound like something a well-known bard from Poteidaia would say?