Renaissance Pictures, the production company behind both XENA and HERCULES, was originally established by Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and Robert Tapert to produce THE EVIL DEAD in 1981. Since then the company has produced two sequels to the horror cult classic, as well as DARKMAN, a three-picture series.

Lucy Lawless, an unknown New Zealand actress who had appeared in a couple of HERCULES episodes, was cast as Xena. The character was introduced as a female warlord who sets out to kill Hercules, the only man who stands in the way of her conquering Arcadia. She seduces lolaus, Hercules' sidekick, in an effort to weaken the Greek hero. Her plans ultimately fail and Xena herself is imperiled when, during an attack on a helpless town, she saves the life of a baby. The gesture is seen as a weakness. Xena's army turns on her and she is forced to walk a brutal gauntlet. A strong body and firm will enables Xena to survive the onslaught and she wanders off alone into the wilderness.

Later, allied with Hercules, Xena kills her treacherous lieutenant, Darphus, but Ares, the God of War, restores Darphus to life and sends him on a killing rampage. Hercules and Xena become lovers as they battle the undead creature, finally destroying Darphus and thwarting Ares' plans.

"It was very much a struggle at first to get that on the air," admitted producer Rob Tapert. "There were very few traditional women as hero shows and they had not done particularly well. I wanted to try a tough woman character, so we introduced her on HERCULES. Once the studio, who had been bugging us for another show, saw her, they instantly suggested that we do a spin-off. There was some resistance but ultimately some guys from the Tribune Group thought it was a good idea and they fell in line."

Tapert, who had produced the EVIL DEAD and DARKMAN films, had always wanted to do a female super hero show but couldn't get a hook original enough to launch the project. A fan of Hong Kong action films, Tapert was inspired by movies like THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR and SWORDSMAN I, II, and III. "I thought there were elements in those that I could use in crafting the woman villain," said Tapert. "We then worked on XENA and I realized the take would be to do a woman who is evil and turns good and make her the super hero. I never had that before and it allowed Xena to go forward. It all fell into place, at least in my mind and the writing staff's mind. This was a tale of redemption told from the point of view of a woman who's a mass murderer. It gave us a big backdrop and a lot of character traits to play with in terms of writing. At least at the time it was different from anything on television." In traditional fashion, the murderous but repentant Xena was to have been killed off at the end of the trilogy. The decision to give the character her own series prompted a quick rewrite.

In September, 1995, "Sins of the Past," the show's first episode aired on syndicated stations across the country. Much like Batman's Robin and Hercules' Iolaus, Xena needed someone to talk to as she traveled the lands of the ancient world. Along comes Gabrielle, a character who was to propel the Warrior Princess into personal realms that would have stunned television writers a decade ago. The role went to Texan Renee O'Connor, who had appeared in "The Switch," the eighth episode of HBO's TALES FROM THE CRYPT, directed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and DARKMAN II: RETURN OF DURANT, the second of the trilogy co-produced by Tapert with his longtime partner Sam Raimi.

Gabrielle is a spunky, nonviolent type, the antithesis of the act-first-ask-questions later Xena. At first a Xena groupie, Gabrielle takes up her staff as a non-lethal weapon of defense. Soon the spirited young woman is as expert with her weapon of choice as Xena is with her chakram. Soon Xena and Gabrielle had their hands full battling gods, monsters, evil priests, out of control warlords and a host of other denizens of ancient Greece.

The writers aren't adverse to having Xena intrude on other myths and legends. She gets involved in the Trojan War in "Beware of the Greek Bearing Gifts." She was there when the Israelites and Philistines were at each other 's throats and young David went up against Goliath in "Giant Killer." They even gave their own spin to Charles Dickens' holiday classic in "A Solstice Carol." Along the way, Xena runs into several historic figures including Julius Caesar, Cleopatra and Hippocrates.

Even Xena's adventures aren't confined to her native land. Xena's travels have taken her to Britain, Rome, China and other parts of the ancient world. There was even an excursion into the 1940's when Lawless and O'Connor played characters who find "The Xena Scrolls," an ancient history of the Warrior Princess' adventures. "It's the number one-rated show in that universe," pronounced Tapert. "You're always surprised when something works and you're always shocked when it doesn't. I was surprised by the success and I'm always surprised at what people like and don't like about it."

When the series first aired there were significant differences between HERCULES and XENA. Surprisingly, XENA was more violent and the sexual encounters more blatant, a situation that was toned down when it became known that young girls were part of the viewing audience. But as the seasons passed, and XENA began edging out HERCULES in some markets, things changed.

"The differences between HERCULES and XENA have blurred in this season coming up," said Tapert, "because we demystified Hercules a little bit by making him not so much the ever so right good guy. The real differences are Herc was a good guy and Xena was a bad guy. Herc is the story of somebody we hope is out there protecting us from monsters and saving us from the bad guys and Xena is the good guy we hope is inside ourselves. Meaning, we've all done bad things and we all need some amount of atonement. So Xena is the hero we hope we can be and Herc's the hero who's out there beating up the bad guys.

"In the past I would say that Xena had more violence. There's different styles of fighting between the two. Xena tends to be more acrobatic and Herc more powerful. Xena has probably more weapons in it. Xena kills more and gets away killing more then Herc does."

The tone of XENA extends from slapstick comedy to the depths of tragedy. The writers walk a very thin line in pacing the stories and the producer isn't always sure that they've found the right beats. Noted Tapert, "There is a part of me that says you're much better off doing a comedy every single week, and, there's another part of me that likes to tell dramatic stories that are different from anything that is on TV, like this season's two-part opener," said Tapert. "Even on HERCULES they were really dark stories. We try to balance it by doing a couple of dark ones, then a couple of lighter shows and some straightforward standard Xena adventures like where the bad warlord has to be put down. I do like to keep that mix. This season was going to be a little darker and I keep winding it back to a little lighter.

"It's interesting - the studio did a bunch of research over the summer contacting the actual people who watch the show and it turned out that people enjoyed the comedies more than the dark drama. Not by much. It was like 55 to 45%. I feel we can get away with different tones as long as they're not boring."

In "The Bitter Suite," a XENA musical, Gabrielle's hidden the fact that her baby, Hope, is alive and a danger to Xena's own son, Solan. "That was Rob Tapert's vision from day one," advised head writer R. J. Stewart about the musical extravaganza. "Rob and I cooked up this Gabrielle - Hope theme, Gabrielle's baby and the repercussions. When we got to the end of that in the planning stage we have Xena and Gabrielle in this situation where Gabrielle was responsible for the death of Xena's son. Not intentionally, but because she hid the truth about Hope. We realized we needed a resolution to that. Some major episode that would resolve that rift. We all put our thinking caps on about how to do that and Rob came back and said, 'I want to do a musical! '

"He just drove the writing staff crazy with that story and kind of tortured them with it for quite a while but I think it turned out terrific. We thought he was quite mad. Absolutely. That doesn't mean that he isn't quite mad, just quite mad in a very good way."

On a show that can take chances with something from as far afield as "The Bitter Suite," a musical encounter, there are times when Tapert isn't happy with the results. In fact, the producer finds faults with many of the episodes. "Sometimes you try things that don't exactly work," he said. "Every one of them doesn't work for me for one reason or another."

Although Tapert likes his brainchild, "The Bitter Suite," he even had reservations about that. The musical episode was the second part of a dark two-part story that began on "Maternal Instincts," in which Xena's son is killed.

Lucy Lawless, who had been trained as a singer, used her own voice in the show as did Kevin Smith, a New Zealand musician who plays the god of war, Ares, and Ted Raimi, the comic relief Joxer.

As the title character, much of the burden for the show lies on the shoulders of Lucy Lawless. As the actress progressed in the role, her wide range became apparent and the producer tapped into her burgeoning potential. "Certainly the more we pushed the envelope, the more we asked out of Lucy," he said. "The more we got, the more we liked, so the more we added to it. Now what I like about the show is the relation between Xena and Gabrielle and how we play with that relationship. How they interact. I don't think there is any show on television that has such a wide range and it comes really from the story lines. We do comedy, we do stories like the ones where the child Xena left to be raised by somebody else is killed by Gabrielle's daughter. There are shades of dark and light and everything in between."

The lion's share of the credit for the show's success Tapert gives to Lucy Lawless. "She continues to surprise me all the time. What attracted us was her performance in HERCULES. She was in the first two-hour Herc movie we shot, HERCULES AND THE AMAZON WOMEN. She had a minor role in that and then she went off and did something and wasn't available for a long time. When she came back we put her in a couple of HERCULES movies and she was just great. In one of them she played a bad girl who gave Hercules a potion that made him blind. Somebody else had originally been cast to play Xena because we had just used Lucy. When that person fell out, we slotted Lucy in and the rest is history."

Tapert was impressed by Lawless' dramatic range as filming ensued. "I actually think Lucy is just a great comedian and understands jokes and how to do physical comedy, and that's very rare," said Tapert. "That she is willing to allow herself to be shown in that kind of light is interesting because in order to do comedy you've got to kind of strip yourself of all pretense. You're at your most vulnerable because you have to be ugly or stupid to make people laugh. She can go from being the Clint Eastwood bad guy to the caring mother to the best friend. That she can do the comedy and every dramatic situation she's been put into is quite a surprise."

As each new season approaches, the challenge for the producer is to find new and interesting plot lines to keep the show vibrant and audiences coming back. Noted Tapert, "Each season we ask ourselves what haven't people seen? What are we going to do with the characters? It's finding ways to make it fresh for us, for the actors, for the audience. Because if we really just did the same show week after week people would get bored of it. That's the one thing that I wanted for Herc and Xena. When you tuned in each week you wouldn't know if this was going to be funny or was it going to be dark. That was my goal, to have a show that would have a wide enough tapestry that you could laugh and cry at the same show."

As everyone at Renaissance admits, Tapert is the focal point, the visionary for all three shows. His major contribution is to work with the writers to develop stories to a point where they can be filmed and to insure the integrity of the characters. "Far more closely then they wish," he said referring to his interface with R.J. Stewart and the writing staff. "I'm involved in every beat sheet. I'm involved in every draft of the script and I give extensive notes. I work with the editing and follow through on every single episode editorially. Certainly every key one, those episodes that are going to be in the sweeps week or leading into them."

For a wacky change of pace, Stewart wrote "The Furies" episode where Xena, through one of Ares' plots, is cursed and driven mad by the Furies. As the crazy Xena, Lawless brings a new demented image to the role reminiscent, not coincidentally, of a well-known trio of frenetic comedians. "I actually wrote the Three Stooges into the script," said Stewart. "I actually said 'she goes like the Three Stooges."

What I was tapping into there was a long tradition of playing insanity on the edge of seriousness and comedy. I knew that Lucy could do it because Lucy is really good. Some people loved it and some people couldn't stand her doing the Three Stooges." The one time travel episode, "The Xena Scrolls," moves the action into the 1940s where Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor play a pair of archaeologists who find the lost scrolls. "We only did that one time," said Stewart. "That was a bizarre idea. That was a case where I don't think Rob was totally behind it at first but I think it worked out great. Just coincidentally, I happened to have been down in New Zealand for that one. I get down there a couple of times a year. The production people were loving that because it was a change of pace for them. They loved the idea of using those Forties clothes and the different sets and the explosions. We did pyrotechnics so they loved that. It was obviously a big stretch for them to create a completely different production look. On the writing side, we enjoyed it too, because we were doing sort of an Indiana Jones homage."

The characters were given another twist when Xena and Hercules were costarred in an animated film released by Universal Home Video, entitled HERCULES AND XENA: THE BATTLE FOR MOUNT OLYMPUS. While Tapert and Sam Raimi were the executive producers on the feature, which marked their introduction to animation, it was made independently. "It was a good learning experience in animation for us," said Tapert, "because there is some stuff that I loved and some stuff that I just have to close my eyes for. I wish they'd let us do another because now I know what I would do differently. I would disregard any kid aspect to it. I thought they did a nice job with Xena but I think Hercules, Gabrielle and Iolaus were all not very interestingly drawn. They tried something with color backgrounds that made it look cheesy, like Sixties animation. But there were some really beautiful sequences in it too. If I got to do it again, I would do a much harder story animated."

The cross-over factor is significant on both HERCULES and XENA. The shows film in New Zealand, where there is a much smaller casting pool than in the U.S. So, besides the Greek gods who bounce from series to series, there are other characters who have appeared on both shows. One of the most popular recurring villains of the week was played by the sultry Hudson Leick. The Cincinnati native plays Callisto, a woman from Xena's past. When she was a child Callisto saw her mother and sister killed when Xena's army destroyed their village. Now a demented warrior, Callisto is on a revenge quest aimed at the Warrior Princess.

Callisto was the brainchild of R. J. Stewart, a producer who heads up the show. "I was thinking of the terrible things Xena had done," said Stewart. "In fact in the back story that we set for her, she's almost a war criminal. I thought she got off awfully easy. Suddenly she decides to do good. I thought there must be somebody out there who suffered from her evil days and who wants revenge. Then I said to myself, 'what if that one is a beautiful woman who in some ways is emulating Xena, but in a dark way,' and that's how Callisto evolved. Sort of a piece of her past come back to haunt her. Then, of course, casting Hudson Leick was the other half of that equation."

"Hudson is great," said Tapert. "I like her a lot. We had a casting call and as soon as Hudson walked in the room we knew she was the one. But now she's gone. We killed her off in 'The Sacrifice II.' She's gone for good." The veritable Bruce Campbell who had starred in Tapert's EVIL DEAD trilogy, plays Autolycus, the thief. The character originated on HERCULES in the second season opener, "King of Thieves," but has made many return engagements on XENA, starting with "Royal Couple of Thieves." When a group of warlords get together to bid on a chest containing a weapon that may mean world domination, Xena and Autolycus team up to steal the treasure. "Bruce and I go back 20 years," Tapert explained. "I think Bruce is the modern-day equivalent of Cary Grant and nobody really uses him in that role or that part."

Another of the comedy relief characters that populate ancient Greece is Joxer, the Mighty. Ted Raimi, Renaissance partner Sam's younger brother, plays Joxer, whose swagger and bravado over-compensate for his lack of any martial arts skills. Dressed in Grecian retro armor, Joxer frequently crosses paths with Xena and Gabrielle. The vagabond warrior has an unrequited romantic interest in Gabrielle. "I've known Ted even longer then I've known Bruce," said Tapert. "In 'Callisto' we wanted a kind of bumbling, comedy character and I thought of Ted. I showed some film of him to the guys and they loved him. He's great in it. He likes Gabrielle, but I'm not sure she's all that interested."

Other supporting characters include Salmoneus, played by American actor Robert Trebor, who has appeared in 25 episodes of HERCULES and XENA, and Ares, the God of War. Ares, played by a New Zealand musician, Kevin Smith, has had a love-hate relationship with Xena since she thwarted his plans for Darphus in "Unchained Heart." He loves her. She hates him. He pops up now and again with a new plan to a) seduce the Warrior Princess, or b) destroy her out of spite.

Since Lucy Lawless is the center of attention on the program, her schedule is as rugged as anyone's on television. There are times during the shooting schedule when, because of other business commitments or industry conventions, Lawless isn't available. She attends NAPTE (National Association of Programming Television Executives) annually, a television sales convention for syndicators. "We generally have to do at least one episode that doesn't have Lucy in it in order to shoot in that time period," Tapert explained. "If we know that there are going to be some really difficult episodes, we try to design one or two to give Lucy a little bit of time off because she is often in almost every single shot, like the two openers for this season. That gets tough on a regular TV schedule.

"I believe that Lucy has the hardest schedule of anybody working on television. Just by the nature of the show. I know David Duchovny would argue that he's got the longest schedule, but I think both of them have those bragging rights. He doesn't, however, have the physical demands of XENA, but he does have the hours."

Almost from the show's premiere, lesbian groups were drawn to the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle. As the thread of that bond stretched out, the writers pushed the boundaries solidifying the feelings the pair have for each other. Even Ares, the God of War is bewildered by the relationship. Pointing to Gabrielle in one episode, he says to Xena, "I still don't see what you see in her." "We're not really playing to that audience," said Tapert diplomatically. "There is a love relationship, meaning there's no question that Xena and Gabrielle love each other and are willing to lie down their lives for each other, but I don't necessarily want to say that they have a sexual relationship either. There's no question that it is a story of the love between two characters, but if there's a sexual relationship between them, it's none of my business."

Since syndicated television doesn't have the censorial roadblocks that often plague network productions, XENA depends more on a system of self-policing to maintain standards that would be acceptable both to their affiliates and the brass at Universal Television, the company that distributes the show. "The Gauntlet" episode is a case in point. Betrayed by her troops, Xena must suffer the ravages of running the gauntlet, a path lined with warriors who pummel her as she runs through their ranks.

"That scene was trimmed and it was trimmed by me," said Tapert emphatically. "No one was pushing me. It was one of the few times that I saw something that we had shot that was too strong even though my hand was all over that episode. I pushed the director and the writer to write this because they wanted to redeem the character. They wanted her to go off with the baby at the end and I said, 'You guys are out of your fucking minds.' We did shoot it. It was a really rough sequence and I did trim it back and I tried to play it with very low sound effects and make the music counterpoint to the violence. Make it operatic in its feel and tone."

Are there any themes that are taboo for XENA? "Not as long as everything's handled intelligently," said Tapert. "There are no standards and practices that we have to show anything to. It's just what the advertisers are willing to have their product attached to. There is no real board. It's not like a network where there's Standards and Practices. This is first-run syndicated television. They don't have the same - I want to say restraints, but that's not the right word - the same censorship problems. We get away with more than network television."

Back to the Lucy Lawless Library

Back to the Xena Picture Library