Metro Magazine
March 2003
Lucy A Go-Go
Ms Lawless And The Lure of HollywoodTranscribed by MaryD - Scans by Richard K
Typos are probably mine <g>Part 1 Part 2
SHE WAS IN Wanganui when the call came. It was nearly New Year's Eve 1994 and she and then husband Garth Lawless and their young daughter Daisy were touring the North Island in the couple's Citroen 2CV.
The portents were good. Although she'd recently missed out on a role in Gibson Group's drama Cover Story, she'd told a Wellington mate two weeks before she felt "on the edge of a precipice". And a few days before, the Wanganui Chronicle's horoscope for Aries, her sign, had said: fame and fortune from an overseas call.
"I thought 'yaaaahhh, they're going to call me in Wanganui". And by golly if I didn't get that call. Extraordinary."
And so Lucy became Xena for six years. Her acting career up to that point hadn't exactly suggested she was bound for international fame but her drive to become a successful performer had been with her nearly all her life.
Born to Frank and Julie Ryan of Mount Albert 35 years ago, she was the couple's first daughter. They're a large Irish Catholic family, the Ryans. Lawless has five brothers and a younger sister. Frank, the brother of famous barrister Kevin, was the long time mayor of Mount Albert before becoming an Auckland City counselor in 1989. He finally stepped away from political life in 2001. Lawless was a tomboyish child. She was neither particularly academic or sporty though she became head girl at her high school, Marist Sisters College in Mount Albert. Frank Ryan says his daughter was "very, very popular" at school, especially with the boys from Mount Albert Grammar down the road.
"The buggers used to turn up at 12 at night and throw stones at the window," he remembers with a raspy hoot.
She was eight when she realised that people got paid to do things like act on television and that maybe she could too one day. Throughout her schooling, particularly at Marist, she performed in school musicals, including South Pacific. But the route from school to Xena was protracted; after quitting the University of Auckland in 1986 after
only a year of studying French, German and Italian, the 18 year old Lawless went to Europe, more specifically to Switzerland - hardly first stop for most young OEers."They spoke French, German and Italian," she says now. "It had it's own logic."
Her boyfriend Garth Lawless, whom she'd met while he was bartending and she waitressing at the fashionable High Street Mirage, soon followed. They traveled together briefly before running out of money and returning home via a stint doing survey work in the Australian gold fields. They married in a registry office in the Australian outback in 1988, but only after Lawless found she was pregnant. She was just 20.
It wasn't in my plans, but I guess contraception wasn't something that was at the forefront of my mind since you weren't (as a Catholic) allowed to do that sort of thing. But I never considered not keeping the baby. I remember coming home and Dad saying 'thank God you didn't have an abortion.' I was a little taken aback by that because it never occurred to me."
Indeed the news came as a shock to her staunchly Catholic parents. "It was a bit of a bombshell," Frank Ryan says. "But I know these things happen. We would have preferred to have seen a church wedding, and that was our hope, but it wasn't to be. She loved him and we respected that."
The on-screen career began the year the couple returned to New Zealand, when she first appeared in TV commercials. And up until Xena, it was commercials, for the most part, that put money in the bank.
She entered (and won) Mrs. New Zealand in 1989, she freely admits, to lift her profile. She was in a hurry, and frustrated by her lack of progress. Ryan says "She'd say 'where I'm going, what am I doing this for? Dad, I can't wait for another five or six years, we're not earning any money." We used to worry about her all the time."
In 1991 she decided to get more serious about her chosen career, enrolling at the William Davis Center for Actors in Vancouver, Canada, for either months before she and Garth Lawless again ran out of money and came home.
Through the early 1990's, she had parts in local films The End of the Golden Weather and The Rainbow Warrior, the television series Typhon's People and in her career highlight until Xena, she co-hosted TV Travel show Holiday. But it was the part of Lysia in US production company Pacific Renaissance's TV movie Hercules and the Amazon Women in 1994 that finally got her attention and pointed her in the direction of a star's dressing room. She played Lysia once more in the company's TV Show Hercules: The Legendary Journeys before being asked to be Xena in three episodes. Xena, Warrior Princess was spun-off Herc in 1995, with Lawless being hired after the company's first choice fell out at the last minute.
By the time that call came to Wanganui, the marriage was as good as over. They divorced in 1995. Garth Lawless still lives in Auckland and continues to be a 'loving, supporting father" to Daisy, who started high school this year. "Though it didn't last, he's a good, kind man," Lawless says. "I think I have pretty good taste in fellas, even then."
THERE'S A REAL ambivalence in Lawless about Xena. She is proud of the shows made during the series' six-year-run. The syndicated hit played in more than 115 countries and made her a lesbian icon (she still is: Lawless appeared on the January cover of America's Lesbian News magazine) and the show, quite obviously, delivered affluence and fame. It also introduced her to her second husband, Xena's producder Rob Tapert, the 47 year old Detroit-born Catholic she married in Santa Monica, California, in 1998.
The amiable Tapert has been producing horror-fantasy movies and television since 1978, including the horror cult classic The Evil Dead. Lawless says their attraction to each other was "like two dark stars in terms of the density of it. There was an inevitability about it."
"He's relaxed," says Frank Ryan. "He's a very generous man. He loves his family, he loves his wife. That's my kind of son-in-law."
And their life is pretty damned good. The couple, Daisy and sons Julius, 3 and Judah, 10 months, split their time between the US, where they have a home in Studio City, California, reportedly valued at US$1.5 million and Auckland where home is a big $4.2 million house above Mission Bay.
Here, thought the security gates, up the drive and across the courtyard, are two garages housing two European cars and the 4WD. There is a tennis court and a large, inviting swimming pool. Outside, the English-style garden is a profusion of summer colour; inside, the house is all dark, polished wood, rugs and runners. There are art and history books in the library. In the living area, where the family spends most of it's time, there are toys, family photos and, atop a surprisingly old fridge, the service sheet from last year's memorial for Lawless' friend, the actor Kevin Smith.
Home sweet home is sweet. And Lawless is certainly indebted to Xena. But even though it's two years since filming ended, she becomes quiet and brooding when she considers what it cost her. The final year of Xena was, she says, poison. Obsessive fans were writing ugly things on the internet, a seventh season was being talked about and she felt trapped.
"I talked to a therapist. It was a feeling of being in a box. It was very difficult. At the time we were having a lot of really incredible nastiness by fans that really soured me about who was watching the show and what they wanted out of the show. It just made me want to kill it, kill the character, because I was so sick to my core."
"I guess I felt like there were a few people out there that I was working for that were so malevolent and so malicious they clouded everything else."
MOST OF THE SHOW'S fans are altogether nicer - indeed her US fans raised $200,000 for one Starship Foundation fund-raising campaign - but the few had a disproportionate effect. Her voice hardens when she talks about it.
"I really hated the things they said about my beloved husband, who's one of the most wonderful, kindest men on the planet and the one who came up with the ideas that got them excited in the first place.
"I think some people have difficulty distinguishing the character and the actor and they were so personally invested that everything felt like a slight to them. The experience through the sixth season told me that I'd paid for everything that I've got in life. I paid in wear and tear on my body and mind."
During the show and since there have been incident: fans turning up at her house and, as a few did during the Holiday Tour, following her around. The Sunday Star Times reported last July, following the Baby Kahu kidnapping, that Lawless had forbidden the media from taking pictures showing her children's faces. She told the paper that she'd long feared becoming a target for ransom demands. But she's extremely disinclined to say just how her sense of security has been threatened.
"You must not have it in your consciousness. You take care of it in whatever way you can, you talk to whoever. I make sure that the police here have records; if something happens, I tell a detective who deals with these things so there's a note of it. So I'm aware if something happens to me that there is a trail of evidence.
"I must say that this is the first time I've thought about that in a long time," she says with tears welling in her eyes before calling a brief break.
Michael Hurst, the Auckland actor-director who starred as Iolaus in Hercules, has had similar experiences, including an obsessive fan going through his rubbish. "It's like someone breaking into your house. You feel soiled. But I dealt with it, didn't let it get to me because it's not worth it. She had a lot more of it than I did though."
The attention bewilders Lawless. After all, television has never meant much to her. "For some reason I don't feel ownership over the character of Xena at all. There was a stunt double and there were writers putting words in my mouth. I feel like it was nothing to do with me. It was never my show, I was just one of the meat puppets, as they used to call actors - a warm prop."
And while she received plenty of attention from New Zealanders, she believes Tapert and the show never got the respect they deserved. "They set a standard, treating their people really well. People really took that for granted and got comfortable with it and that standard will never be met again."
"New Line (which made The Lord of the Rings) came down and set a new standard of what film companies can expect to pay and the sort of conditions and it was well below what they'd become accustomed to on our set.
"I'm really proud of the kind of company those Pacific Renaissance producers set up. I do wish they had got more recognition. I got plenty of recognition for everything I've done, more than enough. I got paid and I get all this underserved kudos. But I do mind that my husband never got the kind of credit that he should have. He employed 800 people sometimes - and for years and years and years."
And Xena never got good slots on New Zealand television, she says. It was almost as if local broadcasters were embarrassed by it. "I just think that the show could have - should have - been a point of pride. For some reason nobody seemed to understand that it was supposed to be funny. That it was campy. We're a great nation of irony and bloody Monty Python and yet couldn't put irony and the American accent together. It was largely made by Kiwis, those people that went on to The Lord of the Rings developed their skills on Hercules and Xena."
She sounds angry, but then her mood quickly lightens. "The moment we finish talking about this," she says, smiling, "I'll never think of it again."
THE WARRIOR PRINCESS is dead, though she's passed into the purgatory of re-runs, and Lawless has taken the last couple of years to recuperate from her. "I had to. I could have walked straight into another set; two shows wanted me. But I knew that my sanity was riding on it and I really wanted to have another kid and, despite the fact my career could be completely over, I went ahead. The probability of being a pissed-off old lady having not had enough kids was higher than the probability of not getting the show I wanted. It was a much more compelling argument."
But in the next couple of months she much make a decision about what to do next. She hasn't made so much money, she says, that she no longer needs to work. "I know this must happen to everybody at some point, where your dreams and your pragmatism clash and you have to choose one or the rather. I'm a little afraid of that."
If you've starred in a show that's lasted more than three years, Hollywood considers you a reliable commodity. Despite her now two year absence from American prime-time television, her stock still seems high in Hollywood: her pregnancy and the birth of Judah rated a mention in USA Today, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and E! Entertainment. Lawless has serious offers in front of her, though she won't say what.
Basically, she says, her agents want her to do anything but the television contracts she's being offered are all around five years. She has what she calls "a slight fear of knowing where I'm going to be for five solid years - and that's only if it's a success. So I want to choose to be happy, so I'd better be doing something I feel passionate about." And living part of the time in New Zealand, close to Daisy, is a key consideration.
There are rumours of a Xena film. She had a couple bit parts during and after Xena: a cameo in the 1999 New Zealand film I'll Make You Happy and as "punk rock girl" in last year's Spider Man. She wants more, and better. "I would rather do two movies a year and raise my kids because that would be an interesting career. I don't know how financially lucrative that would be. But if the right thing doesn't pop then the decision is to do nothing."
What is she committed to doing this year - after making a rare appearance at a Xena convention in Los Angeles last month - is a short history and travel series on warrior women for the Discovery Channel. The series will take her to China, Europe, England, Ireland and New Mexico. The ambition and the passion for acting is still there; you hear it in her voice, and according to those who have worked with her, she's an intense actress. But her versatility is unknown. Could she carry a comedy or a serious drama on the big screen or small? And can she truly escape Xena? Her fans - and they have hundreds of devotional websites - are Xena's fans. Lawless's fame is utterly intertwined with her on-screen doppelganger.
Developing her career beyond it requires escape from the ghetto of Xena for a broader fan base but such cult shows and characters tend to have the tenacious gravitational pull of a black hole Just ask William Shatner, whose career has, more or less, been one of diminishing returns after Star Trek. The fate of Kevin Sorbo is also instructive: after Hercules: The Legendary Journeys ended in 1999, the American actor found himself in another hero-against-the-odds role in another cult, sci-fi TV show, Andromeda. He, like Shatner, now seems typecast.
On top of this hazard, Lawless has created a quandary of her own: scared of making the wrong move and wanting to live as ordinary as life as a member of the Auckland A-List circuit can in New Zealand while acknowledging that future work will inevitably require living in Los Angeles.
In the meantime, she has returned to where she began: filling in time waiting for the right role, the role that will lift her to the next level. Right now she can be sure of only one thing; she will always be World Famous in New Zealand.
