HERCULES AND XENA: A SEXY NEW BRAND OF SUPERHERO COMES TO LIFE IN THE LUSH WILDS OF NEW
ZEALAND
XENA: EYE CANDY HERCULES: NO RULES
Many thanks to Normal Ruffell
In a hilly park bathed in buttery New Zealand sunlight, two women, deep in conversation,
stroll up a path, tracking by a boom mike and a camera-mounted crane. One is red-haired
and diminutive, clothed in a tunic. The other is shapely dressed like a walking tack shop:
leather wrist thongs, leather bicep gauntlets, leather knee pads, leather miniskirt, and a
leather bustier embellished by breastplates. Suddenly a man bent over a tape recorder
starts to fiddle with his headphones. "Cut!" calls the director, who turns to
the sound man.
"Are you getting it?" "Yeah," says the sound man.
"But I’ve a got a little squeaking on Lucy’s costume." Whereupon Lucy
Lawless’ expression goes from stern to blue-eyed warrior to smiling show girl, and
the sound man reaches gingerly to adjust the offending piece of metal on Xena’s
leather bustier. "There’s a reason she has metal breastplates," says Renee
O’Connor - Xena’s sidekick, Gabrielle, on the show - "but I don’t know
what that is."
The truth is, if Xena’s squeaking breastplates don’t make a lot
of practical sense, they’re a perfect fit in a world where a goddess windsurfs on a
giant clamshell can utter the word "tubular," or Hercules (Kevin Sorbo) can buy
a falafel sandwich at the world’s first fast-food outlet located on a forest path.
Part "Road Warrior," part "7th Voyage of Sinbad" - with a nod to
director Terry Gilliam and a leering wink at Hugh Hefner - the on-screen world of
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess is a place where the whimsy is
as important as the warring. And not surprisingly, the scene behind-the-scenes in New
Zealand reveals a fanciful production world that’s delightfully lacking in
TV-industry convention, and long on spontaneity and improvisation. Casts and crews are
stocked with locals from New Zealand’s burgeoning film industry and every suggestion,
no matter how off-the-wall, can be fodder for either show.
"We hop around from century to century; we do whatever we want,"
Sorbo says between takes one day on a Mediterranean village set. "There are no rules.
We make fun of ourselves…I think people are tired of reality. I mean, ER is great,
but I think you want to escape. [And] this thing has some sort of formula nothing on TV
has right now." In fact Hercules and Xena, in their third and second years
respectively, have climbed up the US syndicated ratings to regularly challenge Star Trek:
Deep Space Nine, the action-drama king. But where DS9 had three decades of tradition on
which to build an audience, Xena and Hercules have turned the formulas upside down,
starting with the handful of made-for-TV syndicated "Hercules" movies that Sam
Raimi and Rob Tapert - the creative team behind "Darkman" and "Army of
Darkness" - produced in 1994.
Their success led to the syndicated series. Now, action figures and comic
books are being spun off, and at the end of last season, 44 more episodes of each show
were ordered. But neither show is resting on its laurels. After a messy shuffling of
Hercules’ writing staff last spring, promoted by a feud between Sorbo and former head
writer John Schulian, Hercules’ on-screen demeanor is becoming a little less heroic,
according to executive producer Tapert.
Tapert aims to dethrone DS9 once and for all by gradually adding a more
dramatic, darker and mortal dimension to Sorbo’s character this season. Xena has
already been proven mortal - or at least the woman who plays her has. Lawless’ spill
off a horse during a stunt for The Tonight Show in October resulted in multiple fractures
in her pelvis. But with many of this year’s shows already shot and Lawless
recovering, there will be no Xena without Xena. Welcome to the microworld of Hercules and
Xena, an operation scattered all over the environs in and around Auckland, New Zealand -
chosen for both its distinctive landscape and low production costs. Depending on what the
day’s script calls for, filming will span from the beaches to the lush parks of the
green-filled city itself. But most of the filming takes place on a 70-acre tract of
overgrown vineyard just to the south. From the nearest paved road, the lot is a sprawl of
brush and trees.
But just a half-mile down a winding dirt road into the vineyard, a visitor
suddenly discovers a medieval castle, a Moroccan village, an army camp of no discernible
time or place and a stage that looks ominously like a sacrificial altar. "We wanted a
lush environment with a time that’s indefinable," producer Eric Gruendemann
says. "We wanted to see if we could invent our own world." They have clearly
succeeded. In the Moroccan set, for instance, the props include a modern hibachi that sits
beside an ancient urn. The village streets are prowled by a woolly cast of pierced and
hairy extras who appear to have been reunited from a Bronze Age Woodstock. In the
meantime, back up the middle of town, two props shops churn out scimitars and sea monsters
as fast as the writers can conjure them. And near the docks, behind the unassuming doors
of the historic Auckland Municipal Markets building, the shows’ cavernous costume
department creates as many as 70 original costumes each week.
On a typical day, costume designer Ngila Dickson sits in her
industrial-loft-size shop, surrounded by seamstresses at work. "We always try to have
a theme," Dickson says of the costumes she concocts for whatever armies have been
written into the scripts. "You have to have some focus: ‘Let’s make them
neo-ninga Nazis this week, shall we?’ And away we go." As she speaks,
Dickson’s fingers idly stroke a rubber battle helmet she’s just invented out of
a mold made from a pineapple. On the floor above, art director Rob Gillies goes about his
business of decorating this timeless universe. He considers a rough sketch he’d drawn
a couple of days before. A Hercules script had called for a land yacht.
So Gillies thought up a sort of three-wheeled scooter with a huge sail on
its back and sent the drawing over to the prop shop - where, three days later, the
full-size yacht is wheeled out of the garage by a half-dozen twentysomethings who have
worked overtime to get the thing built. "It’ll go 70 kilometers per," says
26-year-old sculptor Chris Fitzpatrick, a member of the prop shop’s crew, as he
admires the saber-toothed tiger skull he’s mounted on the prow of the craft, just in
front of a crossbow-style slingshot. A tour of Fitzpatrick’s garage reveals a macabre
den, indeed. There’s an entire room devoted to swords, on shelves arranged by
category: Reptilian, Bony, Mystical. "Skulls are kind of good," he says with a
strait face.
The chances of the television audience taking note of this meticulous
attension to detail are minimal, but to the New Zealanders involved on this production of
both shows, this doesn’t matter: They’re clearly excited to be part of the
project, both behind and in front of the camera. Even New Zealand’s best known and
admired Shakespearean actor, Michael Hurst, who plays Hercules’ sidekick Iolaus,
bristles at suggestions that he’s slumming on the Hercules set. "A guy said to
me, ‘What is a Shakespearean actor doing on a show like this?’ I just went,
‘Excuse me? I get to do these amazing fights. I get to play love scenes. I get to
play comedy and great scenes of comradeship. Does this sound like Shakespeare to
you?’ Of course," he concedes, "it is a little different."
"We’re in the business of selling beautiful images," says Lawless, in
defense of her series’ format. "I feel that the show should be, at most, 15 per
cent style, five per cent eye candy and 80 per cent content."
This is not to suggest the native New Zealander doesn’t enjoy the
attention she’s getting for her fairly formidable physical presence. Nonetheless,
it’s the role’s dramatic arc that intrigues Lawless. "For my money,
[it’s] the best part for a woman in the past 30 years of television." In
particular, Lawless relishes the more complicated and ambiguous shades of personality that
the writers intentionally visit on Xena. Tapert readily admits that the writers for
Lawless’ show purposely try to balance every comedic episode with a dramatic one,
while Hercules has tended to offer far lighter and more predictable action fare. Sorbo is
eager to see the Hercules formula change.
"I’d like to see more growth in Hercules," he says one day
over lunch on the set. Out of character, Sorbo, a native of Minnesota, is a mild-mannered
sort with a self-deprecating sense of humor. "I’d like to see more dealing with
his own personal life," he says. "I think there has to be some romantic
interest. Make the stakes bigger on the show. I’m beginning to find repetition; I
want to be challenged. I think there needs to be a bigger story. What’s his view?
What’s his agenda?" Sorbo’s concerns, Tapert says, will soon be addressed,
although the producers are limited in how much they can tinker with the formula.
The merchandising machine won’t tolerate too much of a slackening of
Hercules’ godliness, for one thing. For another, there’s the demographic to
consider. When they developed the show, Raimi and Tapert were aiming at a teenage
audience. They had not anticipated Herc’s growing popularity with the preadolescent
set. "We had him sleep with a woman once and I got so many letters from parents who
thought I’d violated something," Tapert says. "It’s hard not to pay
attention to the parents who trust we aren’t going to turn him into something
promiscuous. But I am going to shake up the formula for Hercules in January and February.
We’re going to do a big romantic arc with Hercules in February. And we’re going
to play with his powers." Diehard aficionados need not fear. There will be no toying
with the staples of success. As the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix
it. Especially if it’s wearing bronze breastplates.
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