Many thanks to Hadley for the convention report
Infinate Visions SciFi and Fantasy Convention - 25 July
1999
at the Bay Side Expo CenterConvention
with
Alexandra Tydings (Aphrodite)
Well... I checked out the Boston area Infinate Visions SciFi and Fantasy con yesterday at the Bay Side Expo Center and was able to hear what Alex had to say. What follows is a very mishmashed sort of an overview of what she said due to a bad sound system and a splitting headache combined. I've never heard her speak before, so this might be just the same old stuff. FYI for new found Xenites, etc. Alex plays Aphrodite on Xena and Herc. Also, if anyone else was there and I've put don't anything incorrectly, please feel free to correct me.
Alex got up on stage wearing a black sort of 50's style shirt with red leather pants and sneakers and started out by commenting on how glad she was to see that there were people there as she thought it would be dead since it was Sunday.
A Q&A session followed and these are some of the things the audience talked to her about.
She told the story of how she ended up with the role of Aphrodite. How she turned up for the audition in a halter and mini skirt and everyone else was wearing leather and she was worried that everyone else might know something she didn't as she had never seen Hercules before... but she still got the part.
She has two dogs (I didn't catch their names) one who is a completely scared little baby and needs to be talked to and mothered constantly and another one which was a stray which they found by the side of the road during a rainstorm.
Someone asked her if it's weird to work in her underwear and she replied that it was. The oddest thing is that in the winter in NZ it's freezing so you bundle up in these robes to stay warm but then in the summer it's so so hot but you still find yourself all bundled up in these robes for modesty. She spoke of the heels they give her to wear and how her robe ALWAYS gets stuck on her heels and how the last episode she filmed, "Love Amazon Style", she got a new outfit and that it has a corset and boots and the boots take 20 minutes to get on and that once she has the corset on she can't get her boots on so she needs someone to tie them for her. She also talked about a battle she got to do with Discord (I didn't see this, so I don't know if it's a past Herc ep or something for next season in X or H) which she had a ton of fun doing because she got to fight. She talked about how she's done some kick boxing and tai kwon do and she knows how your supposed to punch straigh forward but that for tv you need to do these girly side swings because otherwise the camera will show that you really missed. But that while she was doing this fight scene she was on this beautiful carpet but that every time she would go to take a step or kick, her heel would get stuck and she couldn't move.
This lead to talking about a rubber outfit she wore in Herc and how you can't sew rubber because the littlest tear just bursts open so you have to glue it. Half way through the shoot one of the costume people said to her "whatever you do, don't bend over". Also, the rubber was extremely shinny but because of that, what ever she touched got scuffed so they had to buffer her down in between every single shot.
She talked about blue screen and how odd it was and how Lucy had told her about this scene she needed to do with blue screen where she was supposed to be getting dragged behind a horse or something and they basically just hung a rope from the ceiling and Lucy grabbed on to it and sort of swung herself around and screamed up at the camera. Alex's impersonation of this was pretty amusing. :)
She said that since Herc was ending (and she made a point to say that she hasn't been told by Rob or anyone that it is definitly ending, but that that is still her understanding of it) she will be in Xena more and that she will be doing a back to back Xena... I'm not sure if she means two episodes which will be filmed back to back or a 2 parter.
Someone else asked her about Aphorodites valley girl accent and she said that the writers wrote that in and the very first time she appeared on Hercules Kevin Sorbo was directing and he told her she could lose the accent if she wanted to, but she kept it in... she doesn't think that Aphrodite is an airhead. She thinks that she is actually very clever and smart but that she is so self absorbed that she sometimes doesn't notice what is going on around her.
She prefers comedy to drama and that her three favorite things to do on film are: making out, comedy, and action. She spoke about her role on "Party of Five". She said that she loves New Zealand and she loves the work ethics there and the dedication and how very, very, VERY different NZ is from Australia and that Fiji is her favorite place in the whole wide world. Paradise on earth.
These are the things she wants right now: a skylight in her bedroom, to do a big action comedy, to do a well made indy film, and to be the lead in a series so she can take a break from auditions for a while. She is currently doing a romance comedy written & directed by (?) two sisters. Or maybe it's a sister of a friend.
And then she was gone.
~Had