Lucy Lawless, who became a TV icon as "Xena: Warrior Princess" and more recently starred in campy CBS disaster movies (last season's "Locusts," this season's upcoming "Vampire Bats"), shows up in another
genre drama tonight at 10. She's guest-starring as a futuristic TV reporter on Sci-Fi Channel's "Battlestar: Galactica.""I got to work with nearly every single member of that cast," she told the Daily News, phoning from New
Orleans just days before the hurricane hit.
She was there filming "Vampire Bats" (Craig Ferguson had just come and gone, filming scenes in which he winds up dead), and was pulled from the region with two weeks of filming left, in time to escape the disaster.
Viewers who haven't kept track of Lawless since "Xena" may hardly recognize her in "Galactica."
She's blond and uses her native New Zealand accent, and she wears stylish, colorful outfits that she describes as "visually annoying." It's a role with a surprise or two attached, and with an obvious invitation for the
character, and the actress, to return.
"I think they want me to come back," she said. "It's a role that was always designed to go on."
Asked whether she was concerned about returning to the sci-fi/fantasy genre, Lawless claimed blissful ignorance of such concerns.
"I don't get it," she said. "There's just good roles, and good company. I think all those reasons people turn down certain jobs are kind of stupid and ego-based. You want to be taken seriously, so you're not going to do
something that's genre?"
Besides, she says, her youngest fans now - college age and younger - don't know her so much from "Xena," but from her role as a German dominatrix in the road comedy "Eurotrip."
"I've always got the thing where I think I could be dead in a year's time," she added. "I'm not going to wait for somebody to say, 'Hey, you could really be today's Nicole Kidman.' It's not going to happen, is it? I'm just
going to have a bloody good time now. What else matters?"
Originally published on September 9, 2005
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