Today's Featured Interview is from Lesbians on the Loose Magazine (LOTL) February 2007 Issue
After Xena, Lucy Lawless seemed to disappear. Now she's back with a new look and she's swapped sword swinging for singing. Merryn johns catches up with Lucy Lawless on the eve of her rock concert debut inHollywood
For some of us you seem to have dropped off the map since Xena.
I kind of did drop off the map. I wanted to have a couple of extra kids and that means that my focus was really not so much on career. To come back and reintroduce yourself takes a lot of doing and I've had lots of opportunities to be more famous than I am and I turned them down for my own reasons. I'm not sorry that I'm not doing network television in the States. It's always about being offered this seven-year contract. Being a single lead means you work really super-long hours. To do seventy, eighty hour weeks is standard. I think you have to have a crushing need for attention to want to cultivate that sort of career. Celebrity seems to be its own currency, or else how could you explain somebody like Paris Hilton? But because I had chosen to have kids I wanted them to have a real mother. If my kids are miserable, I'm miserable. I guess I don't value other people's opinions of me more than I do my own. It doesn't help your career to go away but I'm not sorry. I just knew that it was important to me to have kids. I didn't want to wait too long. My daughter was already eleven by the time my second child was born. I knew I had to knock it off quickly and just let the chips fall where they may. Having kids was something I'd regret not doing. Whatever I'm doing seems like the best thing I've ever done to me. The TV critics have always been fond of me and didn't like me doing the crassly named Vampire Bats (2005). But I was so attracted to living in Louisiana I just had to take the gig. It was fantastic. I got to see New Orleans at its best right up until the time of the hurricane. I just see it all as part of a rich life.
Read the rest of the interview
For more about Lucy's Music go to AUSXIP Lucy Lawless FLAWLESS DIVA subsite when you will find news and multimedia related to Lucy's concerts, benefits and theatre work