Lucy Lawless was not a particularly burly woman, but somehow she made Xena seem like a fucking tank and I don’t understand how.
Don’t get me wrong—she was strong, and certainly not a waif, but more than almost any other female superhero actress I’ve ever seen, Lucy Lawless exuded physical power and weight that I actually believed (when she wasn’t somersaulting in front of a ridiculous greenscreen).
When I close my eyes and imagine Xena, I imagine her fucking shredded. Just absolutely ripped. Muscles McGillicutty out here. She could burst through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man and kick my ass.
But then when I actually look at Lucy Lawless out of costume, even when she was playing Xena, she looks... average. A gorgeous woman, absolutely, and rather tall, but not the Amazon she comes across as when she’s inhabiting the role.
With few exceptions (like Linda Hamilton), I don’t get that from other actresses portraying physically strong characters. Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman costume has a very similar design, but I never believed in the physicality of her character even when the CGI physics are more realistic.
Steven L. Sears at The USC Center on Public Diplomacy, Oct 25, 2006
On how he approaches female characters
”The interesting question about writing the female character...the female character was an object, it was a plot twist, it was something to motivate the male to do something heroic. It was never accepted as a character. To me that was the biggest difference, first. Secondly, was the portrayal, and I mean the physical actress portrayal...When we hired Lucy Lawless, what really impressed me was her physicalization. She did not apologize through her body. And that had been the biggest critique about women characters. Even wonder woman. They apologize through their body. ‘I’ve got to be masculine, but I’m gonna off-set it by doing it in a feminine way’. Whereas Lucy was like ‘Okay, I’m gonna do it.’ And she did it. And I remember sitting there, watching that with the original supervising producer and saying ‘That is sexy.’ Because there’s no apologies. That’s a real character. And that is attractive to me and I’ll bet it’s gonna be attractive to other people.”
God!!! If only this were normalized for female characters. The Terminator franchise does a pretty good job at having physical women; Dark Fate also had Grace move like a real person inhabiting space.
Grace has short hair. She looks like a typical athletic butch woman:
Being butch is not offensive. Portraying tough butch women in action movies is not some regressive anti-feminist act. I can and I will compare Grace to Xena because she is a female character portrayed as strong and tough in a very natural and unapologetic way—there are no concessions to preserving an elegant or dainty aesthetic when she fights.
Women come in all shapes and sizes. If you reject the importance or value of women’s strength because they have “””male features””” and you think that’s regressive or not good representation you can eat my entire ass, and also Xena’s.
