Lucy Lawless has undeniable screen presence, but equally as impressive is how she uses her voice and platform off screen. We’ve seen Lawless speak out on a number of key real world matters, but her influence has been especially moving and powerful as a gay icon.

During her run on Xena: Warrior Princess, Lawless’ title character meets Renee O’Connor’s Gabrielle, a farm girl Xena rescues who ultimately becomes one of Xena’s closest allies and friends. That connection sparked fans to theorize that Xena and Gabrielle were queer characters, something Lawless and O’Connor didn’t necessarily see coming, but fully embraced when it did. Here’s how Lawless described it:

“I do remember the exact moment when it came to our attention, Renee and I, on the side of set reading this big, long scroll - because faxes came out in scrolls in those days - information from the Village Voice. It was Michale Musto writing about how Xena and Gabrielle were queer characters and we’re like, ‘What the hell?’ We were going, ‘That’s crazy!’ And we were both like, ‘That’s cool.’”

Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor in Xena
Image via Universal

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Lawless didn’t stop at acknowledging and celebrating that idea from afar; she fully embraced the queer community and chose to be an active supporter of it. What drove her to take that extra step? Here’s how she put it:

“The fact that they should be judged unequal writ large is disgraceful and unacceptable. Good, good souls. I hate that kind of injustice against children. People are queer or straight or whatever they are from before the time they’re born, so to be adjudicating them as less than, getting those messages implicitly or explicitly from such an early age, it’s a violence to me. It’s violence against children, and that just goes throughout their lives so we want to eradicate that, stopping violence to children, telling them that they don’t belong. It’s so upsetting.”

Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor in Xena
Image via Universal

As someone who’s been using her reach to support causes dear to her for quite some time now, what advice would Lawless give to someone who’s first building that kind of audience and might be hesitant to use their platform that way? Here’s what she said:

“You have to identity what are your causes and you have to keep your lines a little bit clean. You can’t be going off about everything because people just stop listening. So make sure it’s weighted where you want it to be weighted. And also, it’s really important to dissent if you’re feeling it because the more we get this sort of conspiracy of silence like, ‘Oh, be quiet. Don’t make waves,’ the more impoverished democracy is. So having the right to say, ‘This is absolutely unacceptable. I don’t tolerate it,’ is the only bulwark we have against extremism and malaise and being, what did Noam Chomsky call it? Manufactured consent. Don’t be manufactured! Don’t have your consent taken. You have to speak your truth and stand by it.”

If you’d like to hear more from Lawless on her experience working on Xena, making a brief cameo in 2000’s Spider-Man, signing on for the “bizarro” animated feature The Spine of Night and more, you can check out her full episode of Collider Connected below:

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