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Fighter to the FinishSix years in leather, with countless fights, several deaths and fantasy TV’s most intriguing relationship. Lucy Lawless bids Xena: Warrior Princess farewell in the company of Ian Spelling. |
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Excerpts selected from Xposé #57 |
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It was six o’clock in the morning and Lucy Lawless, Renee O’Connor and the rest of the Xena: Warrior Princess cast and crew raced against time to complete the last shot of the day, which also happened to be the final scene to be shot for the sixth season and, therefore, the shot that marked the end of the series. “We were all pretty spent, really,” Lawless recalls a few weeks later after wrapping Friend in Need I and II. “We’d been shooting all night. And the sun coming up was a threat to us because we had so much left to shoot. We were supposed to be burning down a town. Renee and I were up on a water tower, spritzing ourselves down because we were putting out this fire in a certain town in Japan. "So it was early in the morning and everybody was dead on their feet. We were all so tired that we never got to say goodbye properly. When I go back to New Zealand, we’ll try to get everybody to pile into my place and have a proper goodbye. It was just an amazing experience for so long, and not to say goodbye properly was a great shame to me. We did have a wrap party, but we were all beyond exhaustion. It was hard to get into party mode...” Lawless politely declines to divulge plot details about Friend in Need, explaining that to give anything away is to give away everything. All that’s known about the finale is that it spans two hours and two weeks, that parts of it unfold in Japan and that it centers almost solely on Xena (Lawless) and Gabrielle (O’Connor) as they embark on one last adventure. The buzz is that none of the familiar recurring and supporting characters or actors – Adrienne Wilkinson as Eve, Kevin Smith as Ares – turn up, unless they were filmed in secret or appear via flashback. Fortunately, the actress is more than willing to discuss just about anything else, beginning with why Xena is fading to black. “It wasn’t my decision or my husband’s,” Lawless notes, referring to Rob Tapert, Xena’s co-creator and executive producer. “I’m not sure whose it was. You’d think I’d know, but I’m kind of the end of the line as far as the chain of information goes. "All I can say is that I feel we completed the story. I feel a sense of completeness about it. And I’m really happy that we powered towards the end. Nobody got disgruntled. There was no lack of love for the show on anybody’s part, not from the grips to the cast to the post-production people. Everybody worked to their maximum output to the very end...” |
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Photo
© Renaissance Pictures. The series finale of Xena: Warrior Princess
can be seen in syndication in the US from June 18 |
More of this
interview, as Lucy Lawless vouches that Xena's "greatest strength is
Gabrielle...", explains why "Renee was a great partner", and
what her plans for the future amount to, in