by Sharon Delaney
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 12
I had never done an interview in a Turkish bath. And I still haven’t. But Renee and I came really close during this one. We’re on the Xena set in New Zealand. The crew is filming an episode called “Who’s Gurkhan,” that takes place in North Africa. One of the sets is a Turkish bath. Renee and I are sitting on the edge of the pool while Lucy is rehearsing a scene in which she will dance before the Great Gurkhan.
During our interview, the cameras will be shifted and we have to move behind the wall so that we’re not in the shot. But our attention is so focused on the interview, we don’t notice they’ve actually begun to shoot the scene. And I guess our voices didn’t carry because no one asked us to move. So when you see Xena’s dance in the episode, look at the wall on the left side of your television and know that Renee and I are sitting right behind it!
In this exotic setting, the first episode I decide to bring up is “Antony & Cleopatra.” “Can you remember that far back?” I ask Renee.
“I remember the fight scene where Gabrielle kills Brutus,” Renee said thoughtfully. “Michael (Hurst - the director) wanted me to scream with rage. After we did the shot once, I said, ‘That felt so over the top.’ Michael told me, ‘No, you can go more, really, trust me.’ And I trust him completely, so I did it again even bigger and when I saw it later, I realized what he was saying. When you take an emotion and put it into slow motion, it becomes surreal.”
“For me as a viewer,” I told her, “the longer you screamed, the more I was pulled into the emotion of Gabrielle killing Brutus.”
“Right,” Renee agreed. “I felt like I was doing something so theatrical but slow motion takes the edge off it. I learned something in that episode - slow motion works!”
When Gabrielle last saw Brutus, she was being nailed to a cross in “Ides of March” and he was partly responsible. “What did Gabrielle feel toward Brutus,” I wondered.
“We tried to throw in some of the history between the two characters because that wasn’t established in ‘Antony & Cleopatra,’” Renee explained. “At the readthrough, we talked about Gabrielle reminding Brutus what had happened. She says ‘You should have been there.’ We wanted to show her resentment.”
“That fight between them was vicious,” I said, remembering the blood all over Gabrielle.
“I don’t think Gabrielle planned to kill Brutus,” Renee stated with conviction. “That fight was so brutal, it was the most violent fight I can remember being in. Everything was to Gabrielle’s face.”
“Did she kill him because of the beating?” I asked. “After she sliced his throat, I thought I saw a shocked look on Gabrielle’s face.”
“Gabrielle is not a cold-blooded murderer,” Renee said. “Killing someone so viciously in a hot-blooded fight threw her. It was an absolutely primitive reaction to be being beaten to within an inch of her life.”
“Brutus would have killed her,” I stated.
“That’s what Michael wanted to establish. That she was going to do if she did not retaliate,” Renee agreed.
“It didn’t even seem as if he were hitting her with any recognition of the fact that she was a woman,” I thought out loud.
“Right, but then, when have we ever done that on the show?” Renee reminded me. “Whenever we have a fight, it’s person to person, without reference to gender.”
“Yeah, the bad guys never say they were beaten by a woman. They say, ‘Xena beat me,’” I agreed.
I remembered the shocked looks on the faces of Antony and Brutus when they realized they’d been betrayed by Xena and Gabrielle, women they had trusted. And the look between Xena and Gabrielle standing over the bodies of these men conveyed so much hurt over what they had had to do.
“Michael was very specific about making sure this was a love story and having to kill Antony ripped Xena’s heart out,” Renee said. “Gabrielle’s look showed her understanding of the loss Xena had just taken.”
“When Xena and Antony were making their plans - you know, with the grapes - why did Gabrielle come over and interrupt them?” I asked teasingly.
Renee laughed. “That’s my role at times. To remind Xena there is a plan and she is deviating from it. Xena was enjoying herself too much. ‘Stick to your vision,’ Gabrielle reminded her. It was great, wasn’t it? I enjoyed watching that. I loved the episode, it’s one of my favorites.”
“The woman coming in and handing Xena the orchids made for some beautiful stills,” I told Renee.
“It’s funny,” she mused, “the entire episode felt so still while we were filming it. Michael kept reassuring us the music and visual language of the scenes would hold the weight.
“There wasn’t much choreography in the blocking and no fight scene until the very end. It’s a very unusual-looking show and felt strange for us to do. Michael was very adamant about trusting him and, in the end, it was perfect!” She smiled.
“You’re enjoying this episode - ‘Who’s Gurkhan’?” I queried.
“The underlying story is so beautiful to me. It’s revenge! There’s so much I can play with. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it,” she smiled happily. “Michael and I were talking about the similarities to ‘Hamlet.’”
“Really?” I said, surprised.
“Yeah,” she said excitedly. “I pointed out to him when Gabrielle goes to kill Gurkhan, it reminded me of the scene when Hamlet goes to kill his stepfather, the king. We latched on to that and started talking about other scenes where Gabrielle is in similar emotional states to ‘Hamlet.’
“I’ve been trying to find things in ‘Hamlet’ to motivate me. I’ll read bits of the play before a take. It’s been a huge source of information and emotional energy.”
Rob had been talking to me about the episode needing more heart and they came up with a bit of Gabrielle and Xena in a dungeon. Xena has been tortured and she sees a vision of Gabrielle who reaches out and touches her cheek. It reminds Xena why she’s allowing herself to be tortured - she’s trying to protect Gabrielle. “Did you know Rob’s original title for this episode (he wrote the story) was ‘The One I Love’?” I said to Renee.
“Really! That’s interesting. That’s why Rob constantly said to try to find the love in all the scenes,” Renee said thoughtfully.
Silence - she’s obviously this over. I comment about being able to see the wheel turning and Renee laughs.
“I’ll have to apply that,” she adds. “I knew it, but we have some great scenes coming up where Lucy and I are together waiting for the opportunity to kill Gurkhan. We haven’t filmed those yet. That’s when we show the love more so than we have in the entire episode.”
We weren’t scheduled to film the last two days, but I made a decision then and there to extend the shooting time. A decision I’m forever grateful for. It resulted in some incredible footage between Xena and Gabrielle as well as Renee and Lucy. And I promise you’ll see these moments in the video.
Renee, who is facing the area where they were filming Xena’s dance, starts moving across the floor so that we’re deeper into the hallway leading to the bath. I follow as she tells me she noticed the cameras were being reset and we would have been in the shot.
Settling in, I ask a few questions about “Motherhood.” “Does Gabrielle know many of the gods are dead? She was rather indisposed for much of Xena’s battle with them,” I pointed out.
“Oh, sure, absolutely,” Renee said.
“I know this hasn’t been dealt with in the show,” I said, “but, knowing Gabrielle the way you do, do you think there’d be any jealousy in her because of the relationship that Xena has with Eve? Either because someone new has entered into their lives or because Xena has a daughter and Gabrielle lost hers?”
“It’s hard to know what they might do in the future, but we didn’t touch on hope at all except for one scene where Gabrielle says, ‘At least your daughter’s alive.’ That’s the only time I remember verbalizing Hope in any way. There were scenes where I would play the subtext that Xena should be thankful that her daughter’s alive and can be fixed.”
Renee laughed. “Fixed - that’s a terrible word. It’s the classic debate, conditioning versus genetics. In our scenes it’s about, is Eve who she is because of Xena’s genes or because of the environment of Rome?”
“We don’t really know why Eve turned so vicious,” I mentioned. “Octavius was not played as particularly bad.”
“That was the source of Xena’s anxiety, I believe,” Renee said. “That it was her fault.”
“And Eve has Callisto’s soul inside her. This girl’s got a lot to work through,” I chuckled.
Renee laughed along with me. Then continued, “I hate the times when Gabrielle is jealous. To me it’s such a petty trait. But I know it’s a common feeling. Especially when it pertains to Eve because I’ve felt, throughout this season, that Gabrielle thought of Eve as her own daughter. For her to be jealous in any way was not something we explored.”
“Gabrielle would be glad that a good thing had happened to someone she loved?” I queried.
“Absolutely! We know how much Gabrielle loves Xena. And after the death of Solan, Gabrielle’s quite pleased to see Xena happy with her baby,” she said with satisfaction.
“I asked Rob if he introduced Xena’s daughter (Eve), Gabrielle’s niece (Sarah) and Joxer’s son (Virgil) because he needed to populate the future time that Xena and Gabrielle are now in.”
“What did he say?” Renee asked curiously.
“That he did need new characters they could use occasionally,” I replied.
“That is interesting,” Renee said. “It’s a huge commitment for an actor to come to New Zealand. I can’t imagine Adrienne (‘Eve’) and Greg (‘Virgil’) would want to stay throughout the whole season.”
As I’m flipping through my notes for the next question, I notice Renee is looking over my shoulder toward where Xena is dancing. She’s just gazing quietly and then says softly, “Doesn’t Lucy look amazing? I constantly think, ‘I cannot believe she just had a baby.’ She’s incredible!”
She watches for a minute and then turns her attention back to me. “I assume the ice coffins in ‘Livia’ were made of plastic, not ice, yes?” I asked.
“You sure?” she said teasingly. “Actually they did look pretty good. I was quite impressed. Especially when I walked on set and saw them for the first time.”
“How was it inside?” I wondered.
“It was quite a claustrophobic feeling being in this plastic container, because you have to be aware that you do run out of air,” she laughed. “And you can vaguely see everyone through the plastic. It was funny. You know, I started to compare it to situations in earlier episodes and I was reminded of the time I was dressed as a queen in a coffin and Xena pulls the coffin out of the fire.”
“That was ‘Blind Faith,’” I remembered.
Renee nodded. “That was much darker and more claustrophobic and smoky. I couldn’t breathe because of the smoke. It made this experience now a breeze.
“And then there’s ‘Motherhood,’” she continued, “and Lucy was dragging me along a hall through smoke made of dry ice. That’s carbon dioxide and there’s no oxygen. I would be breathing one moment and the take would end after I’d been dragged a few feet. Then I’d need time to recover. Someone would say, ‘You can get up now, Renee.’ And the person near me would point out, ‘She can’t breathe!’ It was the funniest feeling. It surprised me how quickly it affected my head.” Renee chuckled and shook her head. The glamour of show biz, I thought.
In “Who’s Gurkhan,” Gabrielle wants to avenge the death of her parents. Can she do it? Can she cold-bloodedly kill the man who murdered them?
“Everyone would understand if Gabrielle was unable to kill him,” Renee began, “but making a decision not to kill him was a much stronger statement and a sign of her growth. She’s been in so many wars now, that to say she couldn’t kill someone wouldn’t be true. How could she not have the courage and dignity as a hero to stand up for her family.
“I’ve always tried to protect her truth in her journey as much as I can. The key to Gabrielle’s character is that she won’t kill in cold blood. To me, it’s the perfect debate of how Gabrielle has been affected by her environment of being with Xena to become the woman she is. BEcause she would not be in a situation like that if she were still living in Poteidaia,” Renee laughed.
I brought up the line in the episode where Gabrielle refers to Lila (her sister) and Sarah as the only family she has left. And Renee said, “What about Xena?”
“What’s wonderful about playing a character for so many years, is you know what moves her emotionally,” Renee explained. “The writers have an agenda to tell a story and they need to remind the audience that Gabrielle wants to kill this man because he assassinated her family. That’s their goal. But then I said, ‘Hang on. There’s a missing link here. The love between the two characters is what unites every episode.’ I felt we had to bring that back up.”
We were getting close to lunchtime and I wanted to ask Renee how her scene study group was doing. “What made you decide to get involved with the group now?” I asked.
I saw an ad for a workshop for actors based on a new technique that was coming out of Australia,” Renee explained. “I couldn’t go to the workshop, but I called the two actors here who were producing it. I wanted to get involved with a scene group to stretch myself. There were a few other people interested and we began meeting once a week.”
“Is it getting any easier to kiss strangers?” I teased, making reference to something Renee had said in our last talk.
“When we last spoke,” Renee said, “I was doing Abigail from ‘The Crucible.’ And I was playing her quite provocatively. I was exploring a character who was a touchy-feely woman restricted by her environment and the time in which she lived. That’s where the kissing came in.
“Recently I’ve been working with David Mamet works. Plays that are dialogue-driven and totally different from Xena. It’s a great challenge. I wanted to know when the show’s over, I could play something else and have the confidence to know how to explore a character again.”