LUCY LAWLESS SPARTACUS SERIES
If Spartacus' fights are one side of this unique series, Lawless' Lucretia embodies the other end a series of political machinations and royal intrigue which lend an R-rated, soap opera flair to the story. (Because Starz is a premium cable channel, there's lots of nudity and graphic scenes, including a closeup shot of a captured gladiator's tongue cut off). As the new season begins, she is found, shellshocked, swimming in the blood of all the guests and guards killed in her house. Lawless plays a much less physical role, as the only survivor of the massacre at the gladiator school, who loses a child through a sword wound. There's been plenty of times when we thought it might not go, and you just sit and watch and wait." "Andy was so supportive of them recasting, because he wanted everybody to keep working. "It was certainly in the lap of the Gods," Lawless said.
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McIntyre seems to pick up the mantle of Spartacus ably, though Lawless admitted the fans will be the final judge of whether he replaced Whitfield adequately. The Vengeance season marks the first episodes featuring McIntyre playing the same character, picking up the story just weeks after Spartacus and his fellow gladiators killed a houseful of a guards and party guests gathered to watch a death match. But though he rebounded after his earlier diagnosis, eventually the cancer returned and took his life, requiring the casting of 29-year-old Aussie Liam McIntyre as the new Spartacus. The cable channel filmed a Spartacus prequel, Gods of the Arena, without Whitfield which aired early last year. My fanboy fantasies dashed, I went on to ask Lawless about the challenges of this season, which finds Spartacus trying to carry on after the death of its star, Andy Whitfield, at age 39 last year of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It was God's cosmic joke on me to give me a gig like that." "I'm strong, but I have no coordination I was black and blue for two years solid because I would whack myself in the face or get punched. "I never liked the physical thing," said Lawless, whose '90s-era work as ruthless warlord-turned-heroine Xena remains her best-known role.
LUCY LAWLESS SPARTACUS TV
So you'd think Lucy Lawless, who once starred as a behind-kicking Amazon in the classic TV show Xena: Warrior Princess, would miss getting in on all that fun, stuck in a role as Lucretia Batiatus, the scheming wife of the man who owned the gladiator school.