-Xena The Warrior Princess is hitting their 30 year anniversary next month and ahead of that, EW sat down with cast and producers to look back on how the show became an icon, a gay icon at that.
-Xena wasn’t meant to be a spin-off, it just happened by chance. Vanishing Sun was airing alongside Hercules and got canceled. Due to this and the studio controlling the 2hr block in which it aired, they wanted another show to take its place. They saw a very rough cut of the Xena episode and wanted to rip themselves off before someone else did. Rob wanted to do a female series and was inspired by Hong Kong movies that had female villains finding redemption.
-The show got an automatic 22 episode pick up which was very rare. The studio wanted to cast someone who was already working with them and so they chose Vanessa Angel. She happened to get sick and couldn’t travel so they went with Lucy Lawless who they had just cast in a previous hercules episode. They originally wanted Lucy to go blonde but Lawless wanted Xena to be raven-haired.
-Renee O’Connor was the producers first pick for Gabrielle but the studio wanted other people so they had her audition multiple times before winning over the studio. Lawless recounts “Renee did a little bit of a “I’m a puppy and you’re the big Xena.” And I’d go, “Stop that stuff!” because I knew that I wasn’t more experienced than her or more talented or anything. But I think it was just her experimenting with the role, really. Anyway, she quickly got over it, put it that way. So did Gabrielle.
-The studio refused to allow Xena/Gabrielle to be in same frame in the title sequence, thinking it would hurt their chances with advertisers. The producers state “We embraced the lesbian subtext with unbridled glee. Hearing that there were Xena nights in gay bars around the country cracked me up. That was perfect. Our general rule was ride the subtext whenever it makes sense.”
-They wanted the show to be transgressive and so the show was very diverse in its characters and love interests. They also put a lot thought into how to end the show and were surprised by the backlash from fans after they killed off Xena, a decision that Lucy regrets to this day.
