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Stuff For Men Magazine
June/July 2000

Lucy Lawless Sheds her sheepskin

Many thanks to Gail J. Cohen for the scans

Click here to view Stuff for Men Photoshoot

Lawless (adj): unrestrained by law; unruly; illegal

thm_page1.jpgLike most guys, I’ve fantasized about lying next to Xena, Warrior Princess, panting heavily as she clutches me close to her body. So when I found myself in this very situation, I was understandably pumped. The catch: In my dreams, we were not strapped together and suspended 150 feet in the air by a flimsy cable and harness. The reality: We are on the Dive Devil at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, California. Lucy Lawless, the buff, beautiful New Zealander and star of the mother of all televixen dramas—which is winding down its fifth mammoth hit season—has dragged me here kicking and screaming to put our lives on the line. She pulls a rip cord, and suddenly we’re free-falling at 60 mph. I’m screaming like a woman, but she’s as calm as Puff Daddy on Prozac. As I stumble off the ride tasting another chunky chew of the backed-up BLT I ate two hours ago, she turns to me and says, “Whoa, that was a great organic high.” This is one cool Kiwi.


Stuff, July 2000

By Jonathan Small

For Lucy, brushes with death are as second nature as brushing her teeth. “I once bungee-jumped out of a helicopter,” she tells me. “It was an 800-foot fall, and I wasn’t that impressed. You’re so high above the ground that you don’t get the sense of imminent death like you do when you’re jumping off, say, a bridge.” Sounds insane? Remember, she’s from New Zealand, the earth’s home office for life-threatening activity. These are the same sickos that brought us bungee jumping and zorbing (the truest test of intestinal fortitude, in which you roll down a mountain in a large, out-of-control ball). “We live at the edge of the world, so we live on the edge,” Lucy explains. “Kiwis will always sacrifice money and security for adventure and challenge.”

Xena, the TV show, has met numerous challenges and vanquished them all. Undisputedly the highest-rated original syndicated drama on the planet will end this season with an incredible cliff-hanger. Xena, the battling soccer mom, works out some family issues with her evil, but still beloved, daughter in the hopes of retrieving her from the Dark Side.

But hey, everybody’s got family problems. We’re here to have a little fun. So naturally, Lucy decides to take on Goliath, one of the fastest roller coasters in the world. As we slowly ascend toward the 255-foot drop point, I ask her how she keeps the blood flowing when she’s not hopping off helicopters or eviscerating a Visigoth. For starters, on her show, she does many of her own stunts and frequently has to endure cuts, bruises and torn ligaments. “I psych myself down,” she says. “Sometimes you’ve just got to give it a whirl. Embrace death, darling.”

Before Lucy got her big break drop-kicking demons and crushing cyclops’ heads between her thighs, she skipped around, looking to scare up some scratch. At 17, she broke her nails as a gold miner in the Australian outback. “There’s always work for Kiwis there,” she says. “We do all the jobs Australians would never do. I had to saw miles of bloody rock in half. It was the most depressing thing, because in the middle of winter, it’s freezing. You start work early in the morning, and there’s water spinning off the drill. You get sick of being cut, wet and cold. They train Marines in wet and cold, you know, because it’s such an unnatural situation for the body to find itself in. We’re not born to deal with that.”

She didn’t deal with it for long. After a few months of busting boulders, she returned to New Zealand, where she started acting. Continuing her natural evolution to warriordom, she appeared in a local comedy show called Funny Business and cohosted a travel show called Air New Zealand Holiday by 1992. Fortunately, she got the chance to flex her acting muscles with a number of guest shots as different characters on Hercules. One of them—a cute little man-eater named Xena—scored a knockout with the show’s legion of classic-literature fans. Once the producer (now her husband) got a look at the Bulgarian (don’t ask—that’s what they told us. We thought she looked Armenian) warrior’s killer moves, he gave Lucy her own series.

That was five years ago. Since then, her show has been laying waste to the competition in 115 countries worldwide from Ireland to Iran. For some bizarre reason not even Lucy entirely understands, she is particularly huge in Turkey, where 60 percent of people who watch TV, watch her. “You don’t have to be American to dig Xena,” she explains. “It has universal themes of good triumphing over evil.”

And it doesn’t hurt that the “good” looks damn fine in rawhide. I ask her if she has a problem being a sex object. “Are you kidding?” she says. “It’s great. Everyone wants to be an object of attraction.”

After achieving speeds of up to 85 mph on Goliath at a 61-degree angle, I’m hurting. I sneak some Dramamine so Lucy won’t think I’m a kiddie-park pussy. She calls me a “pasty-faced New Yorker” and buys us both a banana split. Weathering her assault on my less-than-godlike demeanor, I find myself developing an insatiable crush on her. Not just because she’s more scary-good-lookin’ than scary in person, but because she is so down-to-earth…for a warrior princess. “I understand why people like Marilyn Monroe craved fame—it feels like love,” she says. “For two seconds, you’ve got all those flashes going, people are so interested in you and it feels like love, but it’s a pale imitation.”

Unlike her alter ego, Lucy is the anti-intimidator: She’ll chat with anyone we meet. She also has a sense of humor and no qualms about laying the smackdown on herself—or others. She even cracked up President Clinton: “I met him in New Zealand and asked if he had read how Mariah Carey came into a press conference, tears on her face, and said, ‘You’ve got to forgive me because Michael, the king, has died, and we’ll never see his like again. He was a great athlete.’ And the press said, ‘Ms. Carey, you do know that it was the King of Jordan who died, not Michael Jordan?’ She just ran from the room.”

When I first meet Lucy, she’s recording a voice-over for an episode of MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch, in which she plays herself and announces a brawl between Martin Sheen and Michael Douglas. She’s wearing a hot-pink T-shirt that reads titties and beer. I ask her who’d win in a Deathmatch between Xena and Wonder Woman. “Xena would kick her ass,” she says. Why? “Because there wasn’t a bad bone in Wonder Woman’s body. Xena has base instincts and demons.” Xena vs. the Bionic Woman? “The Bionic Woman would run from Xena.” Xena vs. Buffy? “What’s Buffy got? A wooden stake, some garlic. Xena has a full arsenal of weapons—she kicks arsenal.” Who would Xena most want in her corner with a spit bucket and a fight plan during a tag-team bout? “Judge Judy. She would throw the book at them—Judge Judy would get them to eat my shorts.”

These days, people aren’t necessarily chowing on Xena’s shorts—but they might be able to buy them. Her success has spawned a ton of Xena-related products, including clothing, magnets, cups, calendars, jewelry and tattoos. A Yahoo! search listed more than 46,000 Web sites devoted to the Princess. Plus, she slices and dices in her very own Sony PlayStation game. “I am hopeless at that thing,” she admits. “I just keep turning around and walking into walls.” I whip out the Evil Xena action figure, wearing her trademark skintight breastplate. “That’s not a bad likeness,” Lucy says. “I know some people get really upset about dolls not looking exactly like them, but it’s a doll, for crying out loud! Who would have thought that I’d be a doll one day? I’m loving every minute of it.” I tell her about a parody site called Xena, Warrior Milkmaid, dedicated to a Swedish orphan raised by a cow herder sworn to protect bovines around the world. “That’s me,” chuckles Lucy, who gave birth to a little one seven months ago and is still nursing him. “I’m the dairy queen.” She admits to anonymously logging on to a Xena chat room and starting mayhem. “They kicked me off because I said that I liked Hercules better than Xena,” she says.

Among her most die-hard fans are lesbians, who tune in to watch Xena and her sexy sidekick, Gabrielle, kick some serious male booty. “For two women to be facing incredible odds together with no male support, it’s going to appeal to the lesbian community,” she says. “Gabrielle and Xena are ‘special’ friends. Every now and then, we’ll put in a few [suggestive] ad-libs, but we’ve kind of gotten away from that.” In one episode, they committed a not-so-subtle lip lock—though Xena was dead at the time and inside a man’s body.

Still, not everyone is amused. “I met this Texan on a plane who told me that he used to watch the show until it started ‘promoting a gay lifestyle,’” she says. “I said, ‘We’re not promoting a gay lifestyle any more than we’re promoting eating meat or wearing leather.’” That said, is Xena a bit conflicted? “In a modern world, she’d be classified as having Attention Deficit Disorder and put on Ritalin,” Lucy says. We now embark on our last ride of the afternoon, Superman: The Escape (which propels up a 415-foot tower at 100 mph in seven seconds and then free-falls backward). As we descend, the force of the 41-story fall causes my camera and cassette player to fly out of my pocket onto the ground below, narrowly missing several small families and a large lawsuit. I’ve had enough. Like she has done with so many mythological warlords before me, Xena has made another conquest. In one last desperate attempt to save face, I ask, “Do you think it’s smooth for a guy to take a chick to an amusement park?” She looks at me and smiles that seductive smile. “Sure, if you’re 14.” Embrace humiliation.

- Issue 8

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