REMEMBERING XENA

Dreamwatch Issue #85 (Oct 2001)
copyright held by the magazine
transcribed and scanned by Moonchick [PLEASE DO NOT POST HER SCANS WITHOUT PERMISSION]

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Celebrating Xena with Greg Lee, Adrienne Wilkinson and Ted Raimi

Xena: Warrior Princess stars Ted Raimi, Adrienne Wilkinson and William Gregory Lee tell Brian J. Robb about their extraordinary experiences in the top-rated series.

As actors they’re worlds apart.  But Ted Raimi, Adrienne Wilkinson and William Gregory Lee still share a unique bond:  all three played pivotal roles in Xena: Warrior Princess.

Ted Raimi portrayed the show’s semi-regular comic sidekick Joxer on-and-off throughout the series’ run, and even donned heavy latex make-up to play an aged Joxer towards the end of the season.  Adrienne Wilkinson faced a different challenge:  bringing Xena’s daughter to life, first as the evil Livia and then as the peace-loving Eve.  And before landing his latest role of Zack on Dark Angel, William Gregory Lee (who prefers to be called ‘Greg’) portrayed Joxer’s son, Virgil.

To commemorate the end of Xena after a phenomenal six-year run, Dreamwatch gathered the trio to find out their highlights of the offbeat fantasy series…

As Joxer, Ted Raimi brought light relief to Xena

Dreamwatch:  What’s your first very memory of Xena – either auditioning for your part or your first day on set?

Ted Raimi:  I’ll tell you about how I got the part.  I took every bit of money that I ever had and gave it to [executive producer] Rob Tapert.  That was $10, but I promised him more…

William Gregory Lee:  I slept with Rob…That was easier!

Ted Raimi:  The bastard.  He told me I was the only one! [Laughs]

I had just come back from Florida having done seaQuest for three years for NBC.  I was feeling very bigheaded at the time, thinking that I was going to get another show like that.  So a week went by, then a month, two months, three months:  no auditions at all.  I’m broke, as I didn’t know how to handle my money and I blew it all… After three years on a network TV show I was flat broke:  idiot!

I was at Universal, walking back to my car, thinking, ‘I blew my last audition…’, wondering how much gas I had in my car.  I needed to know if I could get back home from Detroit to LA in my car and get a job there as I hadn’t worked in months.  As I was heading to my car, there was Rob Tapert, a producer and old friend of mine from Detroit.  He asked what I was doing, so I tried to talk up this audition and make it seem there was something going on in my life, then broke down and said:  ‘Nothing!  I don’t have any money.  Everything sucks!  What’s going on with you?…’

Then he said:  ‘Do you wanna go to New Zealand and be in my show, Xena?’  I said, ‘Yeah!’  Suddenly I had money to pay my rent on my apartment…

I got very lucky, and Lucy Lawless didn’t kick me off the show, then I met these cool guys…Now they owe me money.  That’s it!

Adrienne Wilkinson:  I guess I can say that when I was auditioning originally, the whole Xena’s daughter thing was a secret.  No one was supposed to know about the 25 years’ jump and I was just reading these sides [script pages] about this empress.  Xena wasn’t even in it, so I didn’t know if my story intersected with hers.

I had no idea what the role was.  I was told it would be working with Lucy and it’s be as her nemesis.  I was absolutely positive that I wouldn’t get the job because I thought I looked too similar to Lucy.  I figured they’d want a redhead or someone completely different…

Raimi:  That’s funny…

Wilkinson:  Yeah.  I thought, ‘There’s no way I’m gonna get this as our features are just too similar.’  They kept calling me back and I was on hold for a week while they were deciding…It was not until after I had the job and received the script that I found out who the character actually was.  Then I realised how fortunate [the resemblance] was.  Rob [Tapert] obviously knew what he was looking for.  I don’t know if it was personality traits or if he thought I could be made up to look the part, but I realise how absolutely clueless you can be in an audition.  To be perfectly honest, it was probably really helpful [to me].  Playing a guest star was a big deal, but realising the gravity that the role had, I would have been nervous.  Instead I was really comfortable and just really enjoyed it.  Then when I found out the role, I thought, ‘I don’t look enough like her.’  There’s a couple of scenes where we look so similar that we really do look like we’re related.

Ted Raimi, hoping to play Harold Lloyd in bio-pic now Xena has wrapped

Dreamwatch:  Was it difficult for you coming into an already established group of actors…?

Wilkinson:  When you go on any show that is established you are always trying to fit yourself in as a piece of the puzzle, but on this show it’s such as blessing for me that everybody did their jobs so well.  I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off weren’t it not for 100 other people behind the scenes, showing me the fighting and working with horses and everything else that was required which was brand new to me…

Raimi:  Greg and I taught her everything she knows about acting…and horse riding.  She couldn’t do anything.  She had trouble walking, actually.  We started with basic therapy, and we taught her how to walk, talk and present herself.  See how lovely she is now?  Let me tell you something, go to: www.gregandtedcanmakeyousomebody.com…

Lee:  My story is similar to Ted’s.  I had come off a show on NBC… It was a show called Wind on Water, Saturday nights at 8pm.  Bo Derek played my mom…  We shot 11 and they cancelled us after two.  I had almost a full year auditioning.  Unlike Ted, I started having multiple auditions right away and you start thinking: ‘The world’s mine!’ 

You find out very quickly it can be and it can’t. I booked this movie with Billy Bob Thornton and Burt Reynolds… The movie falls apart, so I didn’t get to shoot it.  I test for three shows, don’t get any of them.  I book another lead in an independent feature, but then I book a movie called Remember the Titans, so I pass on the lead of the independent feature to do Remember the Titans, then Titans falls apart for me…

I go a full year of absolutely nothing coming together, and I’m a mess.  I’m involved in a law suit with my manager, which drains me of all my money from the NBC series I had done, so I’m broke.  I go home for Christmas and I’m ready to give up.  I’m like, ‘It’s done.  There’s nothing that can fix this problem.’  I’m offered this soap, two different times and it’s not what I want to so, do I walk away from it.  I decided when I was home in Virginia that I’d go back to LA and no matter what was offered, I’d take it.  I’d work on it and make the most of it.

Raimi:  That’s so much like what happened to me.  That’s so weird.

Lee:  I get back to LA and three weeks later I get called back to audition for Xena and I say, ‘Yeah, sure.’  Ever since, it seems like this karma thing as I’ve been pretty much working regularly, it’s a great experience…

Adrienne Wilkinson, who feels that future roles will have to be good to live up to Xena

Dreamwatch:  So what is your final memory of being on Xena?

Raimi:  I remember they gagged me and chloroformed me and then I woke up in America…  They said, ‘Money?  What money?’  No…  There was an episode which I did which I thought was going to be my last.  As it happened I came back two more times, but that episode which I was pretty sure was my last was the one where I died [Eve].

As often happens on any shooting day, they seldom do it in order.  That death scene was shot just before lunch.  Greg was there, Adrienne was there… I had this image in my head that morning:  ‘You know when I do my death scene… everyone will be like, ‘Yeah, Ted, you did great these last six years, you were so good.’  They’re gonna hand me a big basket of flowers and everyone will applaud and they’ll say, ‘We want you to stay!  Don’t go back to America…’

It was a rough morning, it was long, and Adrienne and I had a lot to do, and I’m wearing this heavy old-age make-up… Finally we’re at my death scene.  I’m lying on the ground and we shoot the scene, everyone’s crying – Lucy, Renee [O’Connor, Gabrielle] – doing their thing.  Then they yell, ‘Cut!’  And I thought, ‘Well this is it…  This is my moment.’  They go, “Well that’s lunch everybody!’  And the crew are going, ‘Thank God, I’m starving.’  Everybody got up and left!  And I went, ‘Wow, that just sucked…’

It was so appropriate that it should have ended like that, because it reminded me what a factory it is.  It’s a movie factory.  You’ve got all these ideas of what acting might be, but that’s really what it is… That’s my biggest memory of the last couple of moments of the show…

Wilkinson:  I remember the last day before you left:  everyone was specifically ignoring you, so that at the end we could surprise you with a gift…

Raimi:  It was a $10 gift certificate to any MacDonalds in Australia or New Zealand…No, that’s not true.  They had a big surprise for me at the end of the day…but that particular day was kinda sad.

Wilkinson:  The last episode that I did [The Path of Vengeance] wasn’t expected to be my last.  There wasn’t a guarantee that I was coming back, but the storyline was sort of vague and undone, and no one really thought it was the end of my character yet.  They ended one episode as noon and were starting another at 1pm, so everyone was very busy.  I just assumed I’d get to see everyone again…

In the end I didn’t come back and I think the storylines turned out better that way, as the way that the episode ended was better than I ever imagined.  I thought it really sewed up the storylines.  So I never really said goodbyes to everyone and was never really sad, which is probably good…

I’ve seen everyone recently, and I’m struck my what an extraordinary group of people Xena had, how talented, interesting and… I’m so proud to just have been a part of it, being part of that group of people…

There’s always stuff you don’t talk about on a show; that in an interview you stay away from.  On Xena there’s nothing like that, I had such an extraordinary experience in every sense that it’s going to be really hard for anything else to live up to it.

Raimi:  It’s true.  On every show that you work on there is always one person who’s like just an ass, the ass or maybe asses plural, depending… but there was really no-one who was like that…

Greg Lee, now one of the regulars on James Cameron's Dark Angel

Lee:  My [final] memory was, ‘Thank God. I don’t have to work with that ass Ted Raimi!  I’m outta here!’ [Laughs]

When I left I thought, ‘OK everybody, I’ll see you on the next episode.’… They were talking about bringing me back on Xena, but I got booked up for Dark Angel and went straight to Vancouver and started shooting, then I couldn’t get a [suitable] date.  So, when I left New Zealand, I thought I’d get to see everyone again, I really did… I never got the chance.  Since then, I’ve seen everybody except Renee.

Raimi:  Yeah, she’s mad and doesn’t want to see you.  It’s on purpose! [Laughs]    

Three of a kind

Dreamwatch:  How well did you all get on during the making of Xena?

Raimi:  We don’t like to talk about that…

Lee:  Adrienne and I, we only knew each other when we first got over there, and I guess we became good friends, like really good friends, like really, really, good friends. [Laughter]

Raimi:  You’re slandering her good name…

Lee:  We did everything together:  movies, food, talked about the set and rode to and from work everyday… It was weird because on set I was working with Ted.  I never worked with Adrienne, just Ted, Lucy and Renee… Ted made it so much fun and so comfortable from get go…

Raimi:  Cool, man…

Lee:  Everyone did, they all made it fun. It was just cool.

Raimi:  Hollywood is a hard town, it’s easy to get jaded.  It’s especially hard, dare I say, on good looking people, because they have more to defend and deal with, in a way.  When Greg came on, I thought, ‘Here comes the pretty boy’, y’know?  I thought they just picked him out of a hat… [But] the thing with Greg is he’s a great actor and that’s the difference…

It’s the same with Adrienne, I thought, ‘It’s some nude babe…’, but she can really act.  When actors come in you don’t know what they’re gonna be like…

Wilkinson:  My experience with Ted was that I was so scared to be the person who killed off Joxer.  I thought people were going to stalk me…

Raimi:  Instead they brought her flowers and candy and cried ‘Hoorah!’

Wilkinson:  I was very, very nervous about that… That day was so busy, the make-up was melting and I had to try not to laugh and get through the scene… Ted was ad-libbing so much.  Greg has told me about how brilliantly Ted had been ad-libbing all the time…

Raimi:  How much film I waste…

Wilkinson:  I was having the hardest time keeping in character because you would do something new each take… It was so funny and different every time… That was the only time we really had a scene together.  I was so nervous, but Ted made me feel so comfortable…

Raimi:  That’s a nice compliment.  Thank you.

Wilkinson:  The only scene Greg and I ever really did was together was cut out ofthe episode, from Who’s Gurkhan? on the boat…

Lee:  Oh, yeah. Wilkinson:  I loved that scene, but the episode was too long and that was one of the things cut.  We were on set so often together, even though we didn’t actually appear much together.  Poor Greg had to cry for, like, a month.

Lee:  Yeah, every scene…

Raimi:  It was fun, wasn’t it?  Sets are usually very tense places by their nature.  They’re not fun places.  We make it sound like it was a laugh riot every minute, but they are usually very serious places because so much money is being spent…

Wilkinson:  And there are such time restrictions, it’s such a tight schedule…

Raimi:  The actors are the ones that dictate the mood, so you have a big responsibility.. When lots of pretty girls are together…

Lee:  …It’s guaranteed almost that there’ll be some sort of conflict.  There wasn’t on Xena, which was great to see…

Wilkinson:  Talking about chicks, Xena is funny because everyone looks so beautiful…

Raimi:  But you’re really not?

Wilkinson:  When he saw the first episode, my father said, ‘Is there something you need to tell me?’  When he saw my cleavage… It’d come out of nowhere.  It had been engineered by the wardrobe department.  Xena was one of the shows where everyone had the same cup size, because they’d do everything possible to make us all look so extraordinary.  It was beyond all the actresses! 

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