Rise of Gabrielle

Spring 2000 - Xposé Special Issue # 11

Reneé O'Connor as Gabrielle: sticking it to 'em

While battling for freedom alongside Xena: Warrior Princess, Renee O'Connor is spending a lot of time playing with babies. Ian Spelling brought a rattle.

GABRIELLE IS...malleable. "Xena [Lucy Lawless] is such a strong and stoic figure and she doesn't change very much in the course of the season, because we always need her strength," comments Renee O'Connor, who has spent five years now on Xena: Warrior Princess playing Gabrielle, Xena's loyal and nearly as formidable partner in heroics. "As a result, my character has to be the one that suffers the plot devices from year to year. That's why Gabrielle tends to change so often. It's been exciting for me because I never have an idea of what the writers will throw at me from episode to episode.

"Gabrielle has changed quite a bit, expecially this season I would say, because she has been trying to fill the void of strength that's been caused by this third person who has entered the picture, because of Xena's baby, Eve. Gabrielle has been fighting for three, in a sense, just to protect us all. I've been using a new weapon and I've been fighting this year probably more than I have throughout the entire run of the show. So, Gabrielle is definitely a little more spunky and forthright this season than she has been in the past. And that's great."

One bout of morning sickness and Xena wasn't so tough

Many of the changes and about-faces in season five are, to be sure, the direct result of Lucy Lawless' real-life pregnancy and subsequent birth. As the season progressed, Xena appeared less and less often, with Gabrielle picking up much of the action slack. Chakram and Little Problems come to mind right away. Later, following the arrival of Julius Robert Bay Tapert, Lawless took some time off to get back in shape and be with her son, providing O'Connor with additional opportunities to shine. "Oh, it's been great for me," O'Connor enthuses. "And it was easy to do the extra action work. When we start rolling the camera and we're doing a fight sequence, it's just another dance that's been choreographed. That's automatic pilot for me. I love doing it and it's just that we've been doing more of it this year. It's good time for me, actually with all of the stunt people. That's how I look at it. It's been easy and fun. Gabrielle kind of went from her peace-loving phase to fighting harder than ever. That is all just about trying to let the character evolve over the course of the years of the show. You've got to find tangents that the character can latch onto. Some of the tangents last longer than others depending on the stories and how they develop, and they also depend on whether or not everyone thinks something works. If it's not interesting, the writers usually don't stick with it for very long. Gabrielle is also the kind of person who, when she gets an idea in her head, becomes pretty obsessive about trying to fulfil it to the utmost capacity. Her period of being calm was really just another one of her ventures.

Gabrielle and Joxer: will they ever get together?

"For me," continues the actress, "I believe that during this last year Gabrielle probably went too far into becoming more like Xena. She was starting to become pragmatic warrior. Now I think that she is going to resort back to her peaceful ways and find a balance between the two extremes. And, to me, it will probably be the most solid Gabrielle has ever been. Anyway, I've really enjoyed season five. It's been my most [physically] tiring season, but it's just been fantastic. I've had a ball with all the new weapons I've gotten to use and the fight scenes I was thrown into to create some action. In terms of favorite episodes, if we're talking about action, it would be the one where I was wielding a fireball. That was so unlike Gabrielle and it was just fantastic to do. Our 100th episode was ideal because I was able to play with some of the show's drama, which we rarely get into."

The Ancient World was very windy, so Gabrielle decided the hair had to go

During the fifth season, viewers probably saw Gabrielle paired with the ever-entertaining Joxer (Ted Raimi) as often as they did with Xena. Witness Chakram, Animal Attraction, Purity and Married with Fishsticks, all of which relied on the winsome chemistry between O'Connor and Raimi to generate both romantic sparks and B-story comic relief. What gives with Gabrielle and Joxer? "Who can say what the writers are doing there?" O'Connor comments. "I'm in love with him. I'm in love with him, and they won't let me have him. I think that they are going to wrap up Ted's character this year, so we will find out what will eventually happen between them very soon."

Off-screen, O'Connor has been associating with another handsome leading man. His name: Julius Tapert, the son of Lawless and Xena creator/executive producer Rob Tapert, who was born on October 16 1999. "He is very quiet in that he doesn't really cry a lot. When he wants to make noises, it's usually just little outbursts of yells and war cries. He's very funny. I was sitting down, having lunch with Lucy the other day on set. I was chatting away and I looked over, and I happened to glance at our young Julius. He was just staring up at me. The he smiled. It was very charming."

Inhabitants of the Ancient World hadn't worked out how babies came out

But back to immiment happenings. O'Connor reveals that she and her co-stars are shooting what the production has taken to referring to as "the twilight of the gods." Put another way, polytheism comes to a dead halt. But more on that in a moment, okay? "Right now, we're on our way to Egypt," O'Connor says, noting the show's latest excursion to a foreign land (after the China arc). "We'll also be meeting Marc Antony again and he's going to have a battle with Cleopatra, which Xena and Gabrielle will be joining in on, of course. We'll be out on boats and doing our first week of night shoots this year. Michael Hurst will be directing the show actually, so it should be a lot of fun. After that we'll be getting prepared to have the end of the gods. That was introduced in the baby episodes [particullary God Fearing Child] means the end of the gods' rule.

Season one Gabrielle: trained by the Amazons

"But what else have we shot that has not aired yet? We did one show with a great twist that I can't give away. It's so outrageous that you'll have to laugh, but it revolves around the twilight of the gods. I can tell you that I'm having such a great times with the actors who are our Zeus, Hades, Ares and Athena. They are all these theatrical people who eat up the screen, and it's just so much fun to work with them. I'm having a ball. We had Meg Foster [as Hera] in for Eve's birth and she was great. I love her. I wouldn't be surprised, actually, if she comes on for the [season] finale. I hope she does. Charles Keating [as Zeus, once again taking over for Anthony Quinn] is fantastic, too."

As eventful as the fifth season has been, it has lacked two elements that made the 1998-1999 slate so memorable. One, no episode this season could be considered anywhere near as controversial as The Way, which set off a firestorm of protest over its depiction of the god Krishna. Two, O'Connor has not stepped behind the camera and called the shots on an episode this year, after acquitting herself quite nicely with Déjà Vu All Over Again, her directing debut. The reaction to The Way, no surprise here, caught O'Connor totally off-guard. "I was very surprised," she recalls. "I don't think it was ignorance. I think it was just people forgetting that we're a television show. We were just trying to creat entertainment. Yes, I think we all should be respectful of people's religions, but we never meant to take something and contort it in a way that we were bastardizing the whole religion. That was just unfortunate. "It was probably a couple of people who took it the wrong way and then became so determined to change it and create a protest. It was taken off the air, but I was glad to see that it did come on after all so that people could see it was much more harmless than everyone had heard it was going to be. That was what was to unjust about the whole thing. No one had even seen the episode. People took it for what they understood it to be about."

Continuing tough times for Xena and Gabrielle

Looking back on Déjà Vu All Over Again, O'Connor reports that she was and wasn't pleased with the finished product. On the plus side, she thinks she successfully achieved the comic style she sought. However, she adds, that comic style might have worked better on a different episode. "I mean that in the sense that our comedy episodes are so high and so out there, and I tried to draw everyone back, so that we had more of a straight comedy episode, where the comedy came from the situation," she explains. "So, it was different. I don't think it was one of our best episodes, but we all had a good time."

Did Déjà Vu All Over Again make her want to direct all over again? "It didn't for the longest time, actually," replies the actress. "It was just a nightmare. It's so hard trying to juggle it all. Having Lucy being pregnant, my shedule was just horrendous, so there was no way I could possible act in and direct an episode. Now that we are going back to our normal situation, with Lucy carrying the workload, there might be a chance to do it next season. And now I can say that I'm looking forward to it."

Déjà Vu All Over Again, as directed by Reneé O'Connor

At some point, X:WP will end and the time will come for O'Connor to explore other acting avenues, but that day looks to be at least a year or two away. Still, to keep her performing chops as sharp as possible, O'Connor likes to squeeze the occasional outside job into her hectic shedule. She joins other thespians, including several Xena veterans, in scene readings - of modern classics by Ibsen and Arthur Miller, for example - whenever she can, and she shot a role for an independently produced feature film comedy entitled Rubbernecking. "There are about eight of us who do the scene readings," O'Connor says. "We all thought we'd try to expand our knowledge of what's out there. We've ended up doing it in a dance studio and it's just great fun. For me, actually, it's wonderful because I'm gaining confidence that I'll be able to play other roles. The film is finished, but I don't know what's happening with it. It's on the festival circuit and I think they are trying to find a distributor for it."

Gabrielle is forced to decide wether violence is the answer in India

"Right now, I think I am really in the most ideal situation. I've completely settled into the culture here. I have made myself a resident of New Zealand. So that's great. Eventually, the show will finish and when it does I am sure that I'll be pleased to go back home [to the United States] to be close again to my friends and family. But it's great to be here now. And, as I said it before, Gabrielle changes every year. It's not that it's a different role all the time, but she's always evolving in some way. If that continues, I could go on. I sometimes think about what's next, but at the moment I'm content to mosey on by for the next year. We are still having a lot of fun and I'm so pleased to have Lucy back to her normal self, to have her back in leather, back in the fight scenes and just being the usual Xena again.

"We're still having a ball."