Lawless and order

As a girl, Lucy Lawless thought women could do anything. Her immensely popular TV character, Xena, may prove it true. Battle on!
By Jennifer Mendelsohn

orget hunky doctors and well-tressed twentysomethings. What's really grabbing TV viewers is none other than the shamelessly campy syndicated action-adventure series Xena: Warrior Princess. And no one chews the scenery better - or looks more fetching battling warlords while wearing a breastplate and leather miniskirt - than the show's 30-year-old star, plucky New Zealander Lucy Lawless.

"Everybody loves their law shows and their sitcoms, but this is just a different genre they can fit into their viewing diet," says Lawless. "It's dessert." For many obsessive fans, Xena is much more than dessert. It's a way of life: The Internet boasts an "International Association of Xena Studies."

Calling from her home in Auckland, Lawless chatted animatedly - only to make a call the next evening to confess she'd been "plagued" all day by the idea that she had been boring. Hardly.

The real, living woman most like Xena? "Madeleine Albright. She's a tough chick."

So, just what is it about Xena, anyway? "I might get in a bit of trouble for saying this, but I think men like a woman who looks good and women like a woman they don't feel they're competing with. You don't feel Xena would ever steal your man."

Those die-hard fans can be weird: "A man at a convention wanted me to sign this ax that was wrapped up in green plastic. So now there's this ax with my name on it. I'm terrified it's going to come back to get me."

Lesbian fans proudly claim Xena and gal pal Gabrielle as their own: "We keep it ambivalent so everybody's happy. We don't want to alienate any part of our audience."

Must be a head trip to know women see Xena as a serious role model: "I grew up with plenty of female role models, so I didn't realize there was such a dearth of them in other people's lives. I didn't realize women couldn't do anything. I was really shocked when my father told me, at age 8, that men could jump farther at the Olympics - that men were actually stronger than women. That was quite a revelation to me. My mother says until I was 8 I almost didn't know I was a girl. So it was a big year for me."

The Lawless cure for a recent "crisis of faith": "Leeza Gibbons came on television selling these Tony Robbins tapes, and I went, 'Boy, I've got to try something.' I knew I had to change or die, in a sense. So I bought some bloody tapes off television. They were fantastic."

Sounds like she's ready for Oprah's "Change-Your-Life TV": "We're not an Oprah show. Oprah's kind of a Touched by an Angel kind of gal, and never the twain shall meet. You're either a Touched by an Angel fan or you're a Xena fan. My life's going to have to change a whole lot more before she gets me in the room."

At 5-foot-10, Lawless is anything but waiflike: "I've got to say anorexia sort of bores me. You think you're going to get respect, attention, blah blah blah, and it's quite the opposite. People are turned off; people dance around you. It's bad for your health, and it's unhygienic. I lose patience with it. To any girls out there who are thinking of it, or are just getting into it, just quit your bloody nonsense! Enough already! It's a total waste of time. I speak from a little bit of experience. I used to quite like bulimia. I used to think that was fun."

Why she'll always be a working mom (daughter Daisy is 10) even if she has babies with her second husband: "Especially with a young baby, it's a 24-hour part-time job. When the baby goes to sleep, what are you going to do? How many times can you vacuum under the rug?"

What real person is most like Xena? "Madeleine Albright. She's a tough chick, cruising around the world as a force for good, presumably. She's a no-holds-barred kind of woman. I'd hate to meet her in a dark alley."