'Cult chose me, I just got on the river and stayed on it'

Former 'Xena' star Lucy Lawless tells Adam White about her blazing documentary debut, her turn away from acting, and her sadness over the distortion of what it means to be 'woke'

- Adam White

In 2007, the Xena: Warrior Princess star Lucy Lawless received an unexpected job offer: to headline an American remake of Footballers’ Wives, ITV’s gloriously stupid soap opera about catfighting, baby-swapping, body-burying pseudo-Posh Spices.

“I was living in LA, had a couple of very young children and they backed the truck up and paid me a lot of money,” the New Zealander remembers with a laugh. A single episode was made before the US broadcaster ABC pulled the plug – Disney, which owned both ABC and the sports channel ESPN, “didn’t want people besmirching football”, she remembers. But it was no great loss. “Looking back, it’s kind of a relief,” Lawless continues. “Short skirts and all that stuff? It’s not for me. I can’t keep up with that look.”

Well, she did for a while, if you remember that metal-plated mini she sometimes wore in Xena. For the most part, though, she spent the years between 1995 and 2001 waging battle in a bronze corset and leather dress, sword comfortably in hand. At the time, along with Sarah Michelle Gellar’s cursed high schooler Buffy Summers and Gillian Anderson’s cynical FBI boffin Dana Scully in The X-Files, Lawless’s Xena was part of a trifecta of tough, smart female icons who ruled over the era’s fantasy television. Xena, who journeyed through Greek mythology being strong and quippy and sorta kinda gay, transformed the image of TV heroism practically overnight.

A few years earlier in the real world, meanwhile, a fellow New Zealander named Margaret Moth was also making her way in a field historically dominated by men – going into war zones armed only with a TV camera, capturing images of violence and horror in places as far flung as Kuwait, Sarajevo and Chechnya.