by Sharon Delaney
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 07
“Quiet please.”
“Shooting!”
“Action!”
Everyone freezes. I actually see a man caught in midstride slowly lowering his hands to his sides and gently putting his foot down. But although he’s a foot away from the chair he was heading for, he doesn’t sit down until the director says “cut.”
I’m interviewing Lucy at her home away from home. They're shooting “Takes One To Know One,” and clustered around the director are Lucy, Renee, Ted Raimi, Bruce Campbell, Allison Wall (Minya), Willa O'Neill (Lila) and Darien Takle (Cyrene - Xena’s mother). During a break in the action, we sit on the tailgate of an equipment truck and talk.
Backstage at the first Hercules/Xena convention, Lucy had made a remark about age twelve being the beginning of the “fascinating years.” I wondered what she was like at twelve.
“I went to a big state school, Wesley Intermediate. There were uniforms and boys and girls had separate playgrounds. Very rigid - regulation underwear. And I loved it, just loved it!” Lucy exclaimed.
That threw me. Lucy Lawless enjoying regimentation? I expressed my surprise and asked her why.
“I don’t know,” she said, thinking back. “That almost military type of order. I just dug it. Not that I've ever been like that the rest of my life, but for that period, it was neat. It showed me another side of life from my own loving, but chaotic, family.
“My first week there, I remember a girl talking about church and I said, ‘Oh yeah. We go to church - Catholic church.’ She drew back, eyes wide, and said, ‘Are you Catholic?!’ And I went, ‘Yeah, well, isn’t everybody?’” Lucy laughed. “I knew everybody wasn’t Catholic and to me it didn't seem such a big deal, but to her it was like a cult.”
“Salvation on Sundays and those magic wafers,” I chuckled.
“Yeah, I had some sort of voodoo aura about me for her. Obviously that stuck in my mind cuz I still remember it,” she said. “But I really loved that school. It showed me a structure and a hierarchy and I thought about where I would like to be. In the first year. I was put into a second stream class and I wanted to be in the first stream. That's where I started to get ambitious, wanting to achieve. I really took off after that.”
“Were you part of the ’in’ crowd?” I inquired.
“I guess I was. but we didn't really have that,” she explained. “There were no cheerleaders, no Miss Popularity. There's none of that in our culture. And it wasn’t important to be great at sports. It was important for me and my friends to get good marks in our respective fields, but we weren’t highly competitive with one another. And I’ve always been a lone pursuits person anyway. Being decent and funny counted. It was really important to be funny.
“We were not particularly judgmental and we got on with everyone. Recently we had a small reunion at my place and they all brought their kids and we swapped stories. My best friends are still the girls from school.”
“Do you think the women you grew up with can really know what your life is like right now?” I asked.
“Not really,” she said, wistfully. “I thought they could, but I realize they can't. All I ask is that they believe me. Don't try and understand me, just please believe me.”
“When I was twelve,” I confessed, “I started threatening to run away from home.”
“You waited until you were twelve?!” she laughed. “I started long before then. I was so young, the only place I could run away to was my bedroom. But I sure meant it! I wanted to live with a family that would be nice to me.” She mimicked a six-year-old’s pout, then burst out laughing.
I wondered if she ever got into trouble at school.
She thought. “I'm sure we did. The nuns always knew what we were up to. Though I wasn't particularly anarchic. My parents were pretty liberal so there was nothing to rebel against. It's amazing, looking back, how much trust they put in me and how I didn't want to let them down.”
“Were you closer to your mother or your father?”
“I'm close to both of them in different ways. Even at this age, I keep sneaking my father back on a pedestal,” she grinned wryly. “I adore my parents.”
I’m an only child and unendingly curious about brothers and sisters. I keep trying to understand what it feels like to have them, but to no avail. One of life’s mysteries I’ll never know the answer to. But I try again with Lucy - she of the five brothers and one sister. “Were you close to your brothers?” I ask.
“Not really. My sister and I were brats and they didn’t understand us. They’d be nice, but I’m sure we were very irritating. We used to giggle loudly and incessantly in the car on long trips. I remember my brother, Bill, just going spare and Dad saying, ‘Leave them alone! They’re just little girls.’” Lucy laughs. “My brother could hardly tolerate us.” She sings, “Honolulu, my baby” and makes hula motions.
“When we were really little, my sister and I would sing that in the car. We’d hike up our t-shirts as if they were sarongs and then let them drop and squeal, ‘Oooo, somebody’s seen my bosoms!' After the eighteenth time, my brother would yell ‘SHUT UP!’” Lucy dissolves in laughter at the memory. And she's still laughing as the assistant director calls her back to the set. As she goes, she says we'll continue this tomorrow.
Today, Lucy and I are perched on a couple of chairs on the outskirts of an Amazon village. They're shooting “Endgame.” It's sunny, but windy and just a bit cool. Blue-bathrobed Amazons are doing crossword puzzles. Brutus has been zapped by Xena's “30-seconds-till- death” pinch and blood is trickling down his face. Lucy's hunter green robe with an embroidered “X” on the back looks very warm.
I'm ensconced behind the director and the video monitors. I feel like I'm peering inside a fine-quality Swiss watch - precision-tuned gears are turning in every direction, smoothly, efficiently. Work is divided into 10-minute sections - setup, blocking, rehearsing, and shooting. During the course of the day, I interview Lucy each time the crew is setting up for the next scene.
This morning's papers were filled with the latest developments in the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky saga. It had not gone unnoticed by Lucy.
“I was talking to someone who was indignant that Monica was portraying herself as ‘I was an innocent,’” Lucy said. “They don’t believe her. I think there are plenty of human beings who have done worse things at greater ages. At nineteen you do a lot of stupid things. Especially with the aphrodisiac of power augmenting your natural instincts. I think she's paid many times over. The whole world knows her shame. I feel bad enough when people write untrue or negative things about me. I can't even imagine Monica’s humiliation.”
As Lucy went off to put another pinch on Brutus, I noticed the books stuffed into the pocket of her chair. As anyone who's been reading the interviews I've done with her over the past year knows, Lucy is rarely without a book by her side. When she returned. I asked when she started reading so voraciously.
“As a teenager,” she said. “Then I stopped for a long time. I still don't read as much as I did then. I generally go by author. I started with English writers like Evelyn Waugh and Somerset Maugham. Names I came across at school, but never read back then like Guy de Maupassant and William Golding who wrote ‘The Inheritors’ and ‘Lord of the Flies.’ I started reading short stories and that led me to certain authors. Then I would read my way through their works.
“After that, I started in on the Americans. I read a biography of Truman Capote and that got me interested in Gore Vidal and the Vanderbilts and all the people that hung out with that crowd. Walter Matthau's wife, Carol, wrote a book called ‘Among the Porcupines’ that was about her life when she was married to William Saroyan. I still haven't read Tom Wolfe's second novel. I bought it for myself for Christmas then gave it to my mum or Dad. I want to borrow that back,” she laughed.
“I’m sure they'll give you a good lending rate,” I quipped, eliciting a laugh from Lucy. “I remember reading Somerset Maugham short stories when I moved to New York City after college.”
“They're so wonderful, aren't they?” she said gleefully.
“Garson Kanin was an author with Bantam Books when I worked there and he turned me on to Maugham,” I explained.
“I'm reading ‘The Tenant’ by Bernard Malamud at the moment and ‘Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow’ by Peter Hoag,” said Lucy, (available in America under the title ‘Smilla's Sense of Snow’), confirming what she said at the recent convention that she likes to have two books going at the same time so if one of them doesn't interest her, she’s got another already revving up on the runway.
As we talked, all the books I read as a child came flooding back into my mind. I told her, “I remember reading ‘Omoo’ by Robert Louis Stevenson and the writing was so visual, I thought the book had illustrations. But when I went back to my school library and checked out the same book, there weren’t any pictures in it at all!”
“I had the same thing with ‘Shipping News,’” she said excitedly. “I've got that pictured in my head. John Travolta and his wife, Kelly Preston, are making a movie of it. They’ll have to ugly him down. But,” she said, thinking out loud, “maybe the character only thought he was ugly.”
Picturing an ugly John Travolta reminded me of “Paradise Found” and an interview I'd done with Rob Tapert the day before about directing this episode. Rob told me Lucy loved the rat's teeth she wore in the mad scene.
“Yeah,” she said, her eyes lighting up. “After the episode, they were stolen out of my makeup artist's kit. I wanted to wear them and maybe do a character for Sat Nite Live. They tried to make me another pair, but they just didn't fit right.”
“They weren't off-the-shelf rat's teeth?” I said, teasingly. “You like going undercover?”
“I do ugly well. Being beautiful was desirable when I was growing up, but it wasn't that highly valued,” she said thoughtfully. “You had to be funny and smart - and kind. too. You couldn't be funny and smart and a bastard cuz nobody wanted to deal with you. And I guess funny often means letting yourself be ugly, simple and dumb. You can just let it all hang out. You can be as unattractive and unselfconscious as possible. Because that's what's funny - a lack of self-consciousness.”
As she went back in front of the cameras again, I thought about something she had done at the convention. The question posed was what would Xena do if she were president? The transformation happened in the blink of an eye. Lucy's face contorted and her whole body grew large and menacing and she growled out, “Kill em all!” A perfect demonstration of total lack of self-consciousness.
When the shot was over, we both headed back to the area where we'd been talking only to find the chairs had mysteriously disappeared! Lucy found another pair and removed her armor before we started talking.
“Is the breastplate heavy?” I asked her.
“No, but it's restrictive. And the gauntlets are really hot to wear, thermally hot, not figuratively. When this is all over, I want to keep a whole outfit,” she said.
“On the last day of shooting, you can just walk off in it,” I said, mischievously.
“That's right,” she laughed, obviously enjoying the idea.
I noticed a bit of Brutus' blood on her hands and asked what it was made out of.
“It's maple syrup, coffee and red food coloring. A lot of things that shouldn't be together. Once you've had that stuff in your mouth a few times, it just becomes intolerable. That's why the actor was retching after so many takes,” Lucy said sympathetically.
I rolled this food combination imaginatively around in my mouth and decided to change the subject!
“The blues are not your typical teenage music. How did you start listening to that type of music?”
She paused and then said, “I like it because I like black music. I find if it hasn't got soul, I'm not interested. I'm not into heavy metal particularly or anything that's too white. I don't know why that is. The blues has a ‘body’ feel. I like dance music. Something that makes you feel is what touches me. And soul, nothing does it like soul.”
“Did you listen to R&B as a teenager?”
“Those were the days of U2, Split Enz and Euromantics which had some soul in it. I wasn't hugely into the blues then. I've gotten more interested in it lately.”
Lucy has mentioned Nina Simone a lot in interviews and I wondered when she started listening to her records.
“Oh, I knew of her way back then. She's a real artist,” she said animatedly. “All her history, every terrible thing that's happened to her in her life is in her music. She quit America because of the racism and has always borne a great chip on her shoulder about it. She sings of the Mississippi Goddam which is just decrying her experiences there. She's just the most amazing creature.
“And I love show tunes like Annie Get Your Gun. Mary Martin’s one of my favorites. There's so much warmth and humanity in her voice - and fun,” she laughed and hummed to herself. “She’s one performer who’s always thrilled me. I heard Annie Get Your Gun when I was a tiny tot.”
“Can you sing all the songs in My Fair Lady?” I asked, throwing down the gauntlet. “I can. From ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly’ to ‘On the Street Where You Live.’”
“I love ‘On the Street Where You Live’! That's such a good song. And Leo Sayer,” she says, really getting into this. “My earliest memory is ‘Puppet On a String’ and (she sings) ‘My name is Michael. I got a nickel.’ Do you know that song? (more singing) ‘I got a nickel shiny and new. I'm gonna buy me’ - Those are the two songs that I first remember ever hearing.”
“I just missed seeing Etta James at the House of Blues,” I said forlornly.
“Oh my God, really?! She's unbelievable!”
“You also like Tuck and Patti, yes?” I queried.
“The album Learning How to Fly is the best. And the song that goes, ‘Let’s bring heaven down here,’” she sings. “That's a beautiful song. You know who sings like that? Sarah McLachlan. The way she uses all her range. I'm only just learning how to sing now. I find her inspirational because she isn't concerned about the power or the strength of each note. She's just singing in her own fashion. I admire that.”
There's a pattern developing here. The “lone pursuits” person who likes rebel blues singers, the music of another race, and artists who do things “in their own fashion.” I mull this over as Lucy heads for the Amazon village. When she returns. I decide to delve more into this streak of individuality she has.
“On the television show Holiday,” I begin, "you did bungee jumping, hang gliding and you said you did Grease on Broadway because it was the scariest thing offered you. And Sat Nite Live was the scariest thing you were offered during your last hiatus. I'm intrigued by that choice of words. You like being scared?”
“I think it's the ultimate challenge. It requires total surrender. I don't know that I like to do it all the time and it’s not something I ever aspired to, but I've noticed this pattern in my life.” She explains further. “It seems I will do THE ultimate, I will undertake the greatest challenge available to me. Time and time again, whether it was successful or not, I can't seem to help getting back up and bouncing back no matter how well or poorly it's gone and doing things again. Much as I don’t want to.”
“Like Something So Right? Your first sitcom in front of a live audience?” I ask.
“I didn't think that was scary then, but I should have,” she laughs. “What was the real problem was doing it with my own accent. I heard myself saying somebody else's words with my voice and I felt something clam up - some little valve shut on the inside of me.”
I wondered if she did dangerous things when she was a child.
She seemed pensive. “I don't think so. It's just come on recently the last few years. And I don't know what I'll do for my next trick,” she laughed.
“I know you get a new script every week and new situations for the character, but it’s still Xena and you've been playing her for four years. Doing a movie during your break would probably be refreshing,” I said.
“I want new worlds to conquer, not just the ancient one, ya know,” she laughed. “I'm not ready to give up Xena, but because I live in this bubble, I can't help wondering about the rest of the world. I did some auditions recently and actually got a part in a movie with Bill Pullman. Unfortunately, the scheduling didn't work out. But they wanted me for the part! It was so nice,” she said, sounding really pleased and surprised.
“You enjoy auditioning,” I asked, noticing the playfulness that had entered her voice and how bright her eyes had become.
“Yes, I do. I'd go around meeting casting agents and they were so surprised when I walked in. I'm not what they expected and I had some really good experiences.”
“Did you run into any famous people?”
“I did actually. I'd be with the other actors waiting to be called and, because I had nothing to lose and didn’t need the work, I was quite free to go around saying, ‘I know you!’ I would get everyone talking. For me it wasn’t a financial necessity and, therefore, I wasn't highly competitive. I just had fun. I seldom feel competitive with other people, just myself. I'm very competitive with myself.”
“In the line of work you’re in, that could be a saving grace,” I said. “So many turn on themselves with drink and drugs because they let this town shatter them.”
“No drugs here,” Lucy stated. “And I’ve never been offered any. Someone explained to me that I just don't have that 'come corrupt me’ look.”
“You've been mentioning religion in interviews recently. And the search for meaning in life,” I said.
“I think about religion more than I used to. It’s been coming up since I got married. When you raise a child you have to examine your attitudes and think how much or how little you want to take out of your own childhood and instill into your child,” she answered. “I was asked at the convention if I would consider sending my daughter to a Catholic school. If it was the right school for her and would cater to her interests, then I would. If I had ten children and they were all suited to different schools, I would send them all to different schools if I could afford it. If that was what they needed.”
“Do you think you had it easier as a working mom knowing that your child was with her father as opposed to other single mothers who have to depend on day care?” I wondered.
“Yes. Daisy's father is a very committed parent. And I hope he's comforted knowing she’s well taken care of with me so he never has to worry. Daisy's never been happier. She’s very serene these days,” she laughed. “All her parents are happy and settled. She feels well taken care of.”
“If you had a baby while you're still on Xena, you'd have the child on set with you?”
“Yes,” she stated emphatically. “I couldn't stand a child to be raised a million miles from me and I don't know that I can wait until the end of the series. We’ll see.”
“Do I hear your biological clock ticking?” I teased.
“We would have to get a bigger trailer and a nanny,” she said, sounding like a member of my Student Homemakers of America class in high school. Or would that be a Boy Scout - “Be Prepared.”
I couldn't resist. “You're raring to get back to late-night feedings and diaper changing.”
Lucy moans, groans and puts her hands over her eyes. “Change the subject, change the subject,” she pleads.
Exercise, I think. Can't get into any trouble talking about exercise. Little did I know! “Taking care of yourself?” I inquire. “Putting in those miles on the treadmill?”
“The same day as the convention, I went running up one of the canyons in LA, put my foot wrong and threw out my back. It wasn't a major event so I didn't know I'd done it,” she said. “Sitting on the chair at the convention, I got up and thought, ‘God, my back's sore!’ Next morning, I had to fly to New Orleans and could hardly get out of bed, I was in such pain. I’ve been going to a cranial osteopath to get back in shape.”
I'd never heard of that, so she explained:
“Cranial osteopathy is the manipulation of the cerebro-spinal fluids in the sheath that surrounds your brain and spine. It's very noninvasive and has the same effect as chiropractic without the bone-crunching. I don't know how it works, but it's amazing.
“I realize I've been standing funny since my accident in '96. I had about three months of physio, but stopped after that because I felt fine. It was a mistake. My right foot's been turning in for the last 2 1/2 years. I've got a lot of ill to undo. And I had to stop my beloved Pilates because the spot you use the most in that form of exercise is the exact part I damaged.
“Did I tell you about going to my friend's kids' B'nai Mitzvah?” she asked. “I was dancing and couldn't keep my balance because my back was getting worse and worse. They must have thought I was either drunk or the worst dancer ever!” she laughed.
I’d brought copies of interviews with Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange and Sally Field done on Bravo's Inside the Actor's Studio for Lucy and Renee to watch. I found something at the end of the interview with Sally Field to be very intriguing. I brought it up with Lucy:
“One of the students in Sally's audience said, ‘I get to a point where I can tap into severe psychic pain and then I won't allow myself to go there.’ And Sally told her she has to.”
“I think the problem is that if you haven't dealt with it, you can't safely go there and return,” Lucy said. “I've seen it in acting classes. If you tap into something you haven't been able to rationalize, understand and, hopefully, find closure on, you can't safely go there in a scene without losing your way spiritually and emotionally. And you cannot do it repeatedly.”
She leaned forward, speaking strongly and with conviction. “A lot of actors think, ‘Well, I don’t really want to settle that issue because then I won't have all that heat for me to tap into.’ But, in fact, the opposite is true. If it's not settled, your body and your inner child won't let you go there because it's hurting and hasn't been comforted yet. Once you've got closure, you can go there a million times and you’ll always be vulnerable and true to that experience in the scene and be able to come back.
“The trick is to experience those things in a safe environment - with a therapist, your mother, your friends. Or, on your own, if that feels best to you. But you must go there away from work before you can go there in the work.”
The blue-robed Amazons went racing past us and Lucy suddenly stood up. She spoke not a word, but went charging after them. I stood - slowly, cautiously. puzzled. Was it something I'd said? My first thought was that a scene was taking place right around me. They'd started shooting not realizing that Lucy and I were sitting there talking. What a blooper that would make! Then I noticed all the crew were heading, at a very rapid pace, in the same direction. Someone took pity on me and shouted, “Tea!” as they galloped past. “Last one to the food table gets - nothing!” I thought. And off I went.