PASADENA, CALIF.
In her Xena days, actress Lucy Lawless played a fearless warrior intent on defeating evil.
Well, these days, the New Zealand native is playing another intrepid type, but this lady is anything but warrior-like, and her weapon of choice is her wanton sexuality on the violent and oversexed epic Spartacus: Blood and Sand.
The addictive and entertaining Friday-night drama (10 p.m. on Starz, channels 442 and HD 447 on Time Warner Cable's digital tier), which has given the premium cable network its best ratings for an original series, is set in Roman times. The show follows an enslaved Everyman named Spartacus (Andy Whitfield), who is fighting as a gladiator to win his freedom and find his missing wife. It's Rome meets 300.
Lawless' Lucretia and her husband, Batiatus (John Hannah, The Mummy movies and Four Weddings and a Funeral), own Spartacus. Though Lucretia and Batiatus have yet to involve Spartacus in their bedroom games, the couple often solicits their slaves to, um, help keep things titillating. Seemingly insatiable, Lucretia even has a lover, a slave gladiator named Crixus (Manu Bennett).
"For the Romans, (slaves) were like an extension of your right hand," Lawless, 41, told reporters at a recent press junket. "They meant nothing. The Romans dehumanized people. Societies that allow slavery dehumanize."
But Lawless has had a very human reaction to her character's sexual pursuits -- they make her uncomfortable, she said, or at least they did.
"The first two times I did it, I was terribly nervous," said Lawless, a wife and mother of three, of her love scenes. "I walked straight off the set and into my car, pulling off the wig as I went, got out of my car and into bed. I didn't say goodnight to anybody. I crashed for 12 hours, and I realized I had been stressed about it."
Since then, Lawless said she learned to approach each racy romp (there is at least one an episode) with a detached and choreographed mindset. "There had to be a protocol about doing all these scenes, where you had your boundaries," she said. "The difference is that it became a little bit more businesslike, and then the terror left."
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