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TV Guide (Online)

6 March 2005

Lawless Snatches Halle Berry's Gig

by Daniel R. Coleridge

Lucy Lawless

Now that Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards have split, Hollywood wags speculate that it's only a matter of time before we'll see him with a new lady friend. Well, the wait is over!

On tonight's Two and a Half Men (9:30 pm/ET on CBS), Charlie gets hired at an advertising firm where his new boss is gay. Hoping to score points, he pretends he's gay, too, even scheming to pass off brother Alan (Jon Cryer) as his live-in boyfriend. Of course, chaos ensues when Charlie becomes enamored of his boss' sexy ex-wife — played by Xena, Warrior Princess star Lucy Lawless — yet has to maintain the gay pretense to keep his job.

"I don't mind being deceived by Charlie," Lawless tells TVGuide.com. "He's cute, even as a gay man. I had a fantastic time working on that show."

Landing the gig wasn't easy, though. In the midst of her initial meeting with Men creator Chuck Lorre, Lawless says she got cold feet and walked out. Later, the Aussie actress heard Lorre was considering Halle Berry for the role. "My producer-friend Dan Goldberg, whom I'd done Eurotrip with, said I should give Chuck a call," she remembers. "So with one cosmopolitan under my belt, I thought, 'OK, what the hell?' I called him up and schmoozed him a bit, which I'm not very good at.

"I said, 'Gee, Chuck, I'm sorry. I hear that you weren't feeling the love.' He said, 'Love has nothin' to do with it. Would you read?' I didn't understand, but that's supposed to be a really humbling thing for actors to do. Well, I'm from another country, anyway, so what do I know? But I said, 'Yeah, I'll read for you.' It's Chuck Lorre, for God's sake! And I knew they were looking at Halle Berry.

"I went in there — having put some thought into what he'd said at our albeit brief meeting — and I belted [the audition] out of the park," Lawless continues. "So they went to Halle Berry's people and said, 'We're going to go with this other girl.'"

According to Xena, she balked when Men tried lowballing her on guest-star pay. "They told me that because it was Two and a Half Men, this was a great opportunity and nobody was going to get their normal [salary] quote," she chuckles. "So I said, 'No thanks,' knowing full well they couldn't go back and get Halle Berry!

"Anyway, we all managed to work it out," Lawless laughs, "and however it worked out, it worked out great all around. I had a great time doing it, and I hope they didn't mind having this uppity country girl come in from nowhere, ruining their relationship with Halle Berry forever!"


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