Millions of people in over 60 countries do just that every week, making Xena: Warrior Princess, a spin-of from the equally successful Hercules: The Legendary Journeys now in its fourth season, one of the biggest syndicated television shows in the world. Bigger than Baywatch. Bigger than any of the Star Trek spinoffs. And Xena is good. Produced by savvy cult filmmakers Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert, creators of The Evil Dead, Army of Darkness and Darkman, Xena is smart TV pretending that it's not. Heavy on the cheese, Xena: Warrior Princess ranges from dark, surreal drama to full-tilt slapstick, often within the same episode. It's influenced as much by classic Hollywood comedy as by the Hong King action avant garde. Standing tall in the middle of it all is Xena herself, a woman with a troubled past and blood (lots of it) on her hands doing her best to be a good person in a not-so-good world.

Xena is a hero, an idol. And Lucy Lawless, the 30-year-old New Zealand actor who plays her, is now a star.

Xena: Warrior Princess, like Hercules and the upcoming Young Hercules spin-off is filmed in and around Auckland, New Zealand. The locations are not so much a secret as low-key, and the majority of the sets are constructed in a series of anonymous industrial estates in West Auckland. Inside are temples, barns, ice caverns and labyrinths, mostly made of polystyrene foam and built (and torn down) at an alarming rate.

Mast a panel beater's workshop and a couple of bored-looking dogs, Lawless is shooting the series for episode "In Sickness and in Hell". Her hair is wild, sticking up and out in all directions. Xena has a nasty itch, she's lost her horse, Argo, and she's momentarily distracted from the serious business of being a hero by the overpowering need to scratch herself. Lawless is clearly playing the scene for laughs, ably assisted by the similarly-stricken Gabrielle (played by Texan actress Renee O'Connor) and the bumbling but loveable Joxer (the Mighty, played by Ted Raimi). They have developed, as American director Josh Becker points out, into a formidable comic trio.

When the scene is done, Lawless makes her way across the crowded set to introduce herself. She's tall (even in flat Xena boots she's just a shade under six feet) but not imposing and the vibrancy of her eyes and smile is startling. She smiles a lot, far more than grim old Xena ever does, and there is more than a hint of mischief about her. Her voice is full of fun too, and she is prone to exclamations such as "far out, brussel sprout!" She speaks in a clipped New Zealand accent, slightly higher pitched than the flat, mid-American voice of the Warrior Princess.

Her trailer is small and sparsely decorated. A few plastic dumbbells lie in one corner on the floor. A few CDs - Tuck and Patti, Lenny Kravitz - are scattered on a shelf. It may not be much, but it's enough to allow Lawless some rest in between shooting. Her role is a physical one and it's often tough. "It's not always fun anymore," she says. "I love the comedies 'cause they are fun. I'm at the stage now where I look back and the things I'm proudest of are actually the comedies. I don't know why but they really feed me in a way that the other ones don't. But I still love my job and I never get bored, even when it's not fun."

Lawless was born in Mount Albert, Auckland, the fifth of seven children (five boys, two girls, of which Lawless is the eldest) to Frank and Julie Ryan. Growing up with a bunch of rowdy boys "and a sister who was tougher than the rest", Lawless gained some early inspiration for the role of Xena through, of all things, fear - "the fear that so-and-so was going to get you or that you had to get so-and-so". Her mother tells a story about coming around a corner one day to find the young Lucy chanting "Got to be a strong girl, got to be a strong girl." Acting, from the age of eight in school plays and musicals, came naturally. It was around this time that she developed her first real crush on "the fey one in the Bee Gees". She's pretty sure she means Robin Gibb.

Strangely, Lawless was not exactly an athletic child. "I have no talent whatsoever for sports," she says. "I think I have always been physical, but with no . . . finesse. No aim, no balance." Her nickname at school was "Unco", for "uncoordinated". "I couldn't hit a ball with a bat. I can now, but only because the job's forced me to develop quick reflexes. I really, seriously am living proof that anyone can develop those skills if you're given enough short, sharp shocks." Literally. As Xena, Lawless has taken her fair share of knocks. "You get punched a couple of times and you learn to be really quick on the uptake if a stuntman's coming at you."

Under the tuition of martial arts master Douglas Wong, Lawless has learned basic kung fu moves and can now fight with swords and staffs. "I do a lot of the arse-kicking stuff myself," she says and she enjoys the adrenalin rush of swinging punches and high kicks in all directions during the show's many fight scenes. She doesn't do the back flips and she doesn't do reverses (if you see the back of Xena's head, it's not Lawless) but the dynamo you see on screen is mostly Lawless. Still, elements of the old "unco" girl lurk in the background. "Running on screen is my bug bear," she says. "It's pretty amusing if you really look hard."

Because she is Xena, there's a tendency to tell Lawless's life as a series of heroic adventures: running off to Europe, picking grapes on the Rhine, swinging a pick in a gold mine. "Ah, the gold mining!" she says. "People really pick up on that. It's a good gag you know? 'She went gold mining?' And people have a romantic notion that you're down shafts with canaries in cages digging for gold with a little conga line of dwarves behind you or something. And in fact, I wasn't even working in mines. I was working with my then boyfriend and we were mapping the earth, working with compasses and running from point to point taking samples."

At the age of 18, after one year at Auckland University studying Italian, French and German, Lawless took off for Europe with then boyfriend, Garth Lawless. When they ran out of money, they headed for Australia and for the gold mine in Kalgoorlie, outside of Perth. "To me the world never seemed like a formidable unconquerable place," she says. "It was really hard to die so what are you afraid of?" Lawless fell pregnant in Australia, where she and Garth Lawless were married in 1988 (the couple have since divorced; Lawless married Rob Tapert in March of this year) before returning to New Zealand. Lawless gave birth to a daughter, Daisy, now aged 10, and began pursuing a career as an actor.

She always believe she'd succeed. I've always had this unbelievable faith in myself, to the point of arrogance," she says. At 21, she snuck in to "some sort of film commission awards" and accosted New Zealand pop star Dave Dobbyn. "I went up to him and said, 'My name's Lucy Lawless, just you remember my name!" she says and bursts out with laughter. "Needless to say, he doesn't!"

Commercials and bit parts followed, as well as eight months in Vancouver, Canada, at the William Davis (The X-Files' Cancer Man) Center for Actors Study but, says Lawless, "I could never score a regular part. I truly feel that I was too big, too in your face. I don't think I probably ever came across as a team player that would just fit into a groove and stay there. I could not be trusted to stay three years in a soap, forget it. And I think they were probably right never to cast me in those things." She was working as the co-host of a travel show, Air New Zealand Holiday, and considering an offer for a tampon commercial (the offer was $60,000, she would have done it for $80,000) when she was cast (not as Xena) in Hercules and the Amazon Women. The role of Xena, originally as a three-part episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, came up a year later when American actor Vanessa Angel, originally cast in the role, fell ill. The part was offered to four other actresses, al American, who all turned it down, before it was offered to Lawless. After a quick change of hair colour (Lawless's natural colour is an ash-blonde), Xena was born.

"Xena: Warrior Princess" quickly grew a fan-base from committed Hercules watchers, but also began attracting a different crowd. "Fortunately, the lesbian community in New York first hooked on to the show and started a sort of underground buzz on it," says Lawless. "Not only lesbians, but they were the most vociferous in their support because here at last were two women travelling on their own with no signs of male support. That started a kind of culty groove about it, which pleases me."

There have been reports of special Xena nights at lesbian bars and even in women's prisons. Then there was the troupe of marching Xenas at last year's Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, at which Lawless was scheduled to appear. "It was very cool. That's cool, eh?" she says. "We were so thrilled about that and we had our tickets to get on the plane and we had an accident on the set. We had, like 40,000 gallons of water burst out of this tank." No one was hurt, but filming was set back.

As for the supposed lesbian subtext in the relationship between Xena and her feisty sidekick Gabrielle (O'Connor), Lawless admits that it was something she and the rest of the crew played up to. Still, she says, "We've kind of gone beyond that. I guess we got bored with all the chat about it. We just got over it, that's all. And I always thought, you know, Xena is what she is and she's not asking to be categorised to fit in with a particular lobby group [she laughs]. And we wanted to leave it so that the audience could make whatever of it they saw fit. Sometimes we went a little overboard because it made us laugh and we thought it was a good gag. It was fun. We might have got a little carried away, but most of it was from us, on set, on the day."

Sexuality aside, it's the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle that keeps people tuning in, as well as Xena's ongoing quest for redemption. Good and evil is never black and white in the show, and Xena is constantly battling her own demons.

Lawless, meanwhile, is developing into a classic, old-time star - an all-round physical performer who can sing and dance (see the surreal musical Xena episode "The Bitter Suite" or Lawless' turn as Rizzo in Grease on Broadway last year) and take a pie in the face. She knows the experience is invaluable. "I am aware that in this job I'm stretched all the time," she says. "It's a constant challenge. And the more good people I get to work with, I find that they enrich me and make me get better - Renee [O'Connor] and Ted [Raimi], Bruce Campbell [who plays the recurring character of Autolycus, King of Thieves] in particular.

"And I am sometimes struck by the irony that, for example the wardrobe department will never win an Emmy - it will always get beaten out by The Drew Carey Show or something because we don't have any members there to vote for us. I will probably never get an Emmy for it - it doesn't matter how good I am. it's not awards we're working for. It's for our satisfaction and to make us laugh. That's the way the show works, is that it's not consensus. We're only pleasing ourselves. We're not trying to please the fans, so you're not getting blancmange."

It's an approach that appears to be paying off. As the show develops more and more Xenites are attracted to the strange and wonderful world of the Xenaverse. Whatever their reasons, Lawless knows that the recipe for Xena: Warrior Princess's success is a simple one. "At the heart of the matter is, people like seeing chicks kicking butt. Sure people like the heart of the show and the relationships, but it's certainly true that chicks kicking butt rocks."

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