TV Zone 142. August 2001. Joe Nazzaro.
Lexx is More
Taking time out from shooting Season 4, the Stars of Lexx recently met up with TV ZONE to talk about the past, present and future of SF' quirkiest series
WITH THE WORLDS of fire and water behind them, the crew of the Lexx is now headed for earth. Between the arrival of the loser turned ship's captain, a cluster lizard/love slave hybrid, a centuries old dead assassin and a lovesick disembodied robot head, the Human race won't know what's hit it!
And that's basically the premise behind LEXX's fourth season, now in production. During a recent visit to London, cast members Brian (Stanley Tweedle) Downey and Michael (Kai) McManus sat down with TV ZONE to talk about the series...
Inerview with Brian Downey and Michael McManus[]
TV Zone: Are you both happy with the way the current season is going?
MM: It's very satisfying, getting this season in, because it means that our journey has gone almost 65 hours, and it's really going to support what we've done before. I think people will watch the series backwards, so the cleverness of making Heaven and Hell [the season 3 finale] a turgid soap opera and making the entire expanse of the light universe into this character display operatic, slightly lyrical way, or laying out characters. And in the intro to the whole series, of doing dense historically interesting SF, where the light universe was laid out, the insect civilization, the Brunnen-G and rebel culture, and all of the events are played to their climax, so we have all these different textures. The Show does have a bit of that Swiftian spirit; it will never be middle class. It's always going to be LEXX, and people are going to know what LEXX means as a word. It might show up in OED in 10 years, that "LEXXic" means a situation or person who is negatively disposed to any do-gooding, and has no idea about contributing to the greater good, who thinks that the greater good is bullshit, and is basically reductionist and negative, following his appetite, prick, stomach, head, ego; whatever; it's a world of appetites.
TV Zone: So your characters are basically "LEXXic" then?
MM: Our Characters are the dysfunctional centre that the world of LEXX can be bounced off of. Under normal circumstances, they wouldn't survive a minute in the LEXX universe because at some level they are almost good, but only because good in the LEXX world is harmless. When they're powerful, intelligent or passionate, they're a terrible to disaster to the people around them, and because of certain accidents, the accident of us ending up on the most powerful spaceship in the two universes. There's the accident of Kai getting his memories back just before he slaughters them and becoming a little more self-conscious, Stanley doesn't give up all his limbs to the protein bank, and Xev doesn't get the brain transplant that makes her brain a love slave as well. So she's still got the old ugly woman brain, and a love slave body. Again I think the satirical aspects are going to be very clear this year, and very satisfying to people who have watched the show from the beginning. And then some other people will have to eat their hats about what they've said about LEXX, and their response to the first 8 hours, or the 20 or the 13.
BD: It's all a part of the continuum, so I don't fell any different about this season than I have about the previous seasons. In a sense, it's satisfying to know that we're coming to a conclusion to this aspect of the show. Aspects of the show may appear in another guise, but essentially it's satisfying on any number of levels. On of the really satisfying things is that we have practical input into what appears on the screen in terms of the way we display our characters, and the level of the control we have over the scripts and the voice we can have, so nothing has really changed significantly. It's satisfying to work on it, and that satisfaction hasn't diminished, nor has the level of energy that's required to accomplish what we're doing. I think the 3 of us have strong levels of energy as actors, and I don't think any of us would be able to sit around with our thumbs up asses.
TV Zone: Will Season Four episodes be as serialised as those Season 3?
MM: If I had to say anything about Season 4, I'd say it's a real pay-off year. We come to earth, and you have to earn the right to be there if you're whacked out characters like us. I think the groundwork has been done, so it would be a real shame not to do this season. It really is the end of this phase of our story, and doing it has been really satisfying.
BD: There's a mythology that's been developing, and what would Greek mythology be without Zeus and Hera? As Mike says, the mythology becomes more developed unit than a group of individual stories. There's a group of individual stories. There's a comprehensive cycle to it.
TV Zone: So is the Ship's arrival on Earth a key story point of the season?
MM: It's the key condition, but not really a story point. It's the location of the stories, like Fire and water were or the Light universe before that. This year, Earth is the serial connection in terms of story arc, but its not quite as intensely serialized as the Fire and Water arc. It's a combination. Once people have seen the 24 we're making this year, especially the last ones, they'll be able to watch season 2 and season 3 with much more satisfaction. Some people who haven't bothered to watch the show before might end up privately turning on their television and catching an episode in a while until they are no longer embarrassed about watching LEXX.
TV Zone: What surprises you when you pick up a script? When you've been doing this show for a few years, you don't want to be doing the same thing every week.
BD: That would be surprise, if we were doing the same old same old. There's nothing I can really point to and say. 'That's new', or, 'That's a surprise.
MM: My biggest surprises are not really a surprise, because you see them coming from far away, but the surprise is the things that Paul gets in his head. When we did the musical, there was a lot of resistance [Downey laughs]. We had a lot of discussion about it, and the director wanted to back off and turn it into a play within an episode, but there were a few people who said, 'It's got to be a fucking musical!' and it worked out tremendously. The meetings for what would be the basic music only took place nine days before the score was delivered and the script was written (because it was still theoretical) and 3 or 4 days after that we started shooting. We shot a one-hour musical, full score with the device of a narrator, which is a little bit more efficient, but still, it's an entire musical, written in nine days, shot in seven with one afternoon of rehearsal on a weekend and that's it. To me it cam together really nicely with the amount of time a resources available to us, and even though it had different kind of emotional punch, it fit right in. That extremity always surprises me, that people have these extreme ideas and get to execute them. I grew up in Ontario, and they don't believe in that in Ontario.
BD: I grew up in Newfoundland, so...
MM: To it's normal for him. He's been saying, 'Don't do the musical!' ever since he was 15. If you watch the episode, Stanley really isn't in it.
BD: I'm not a fan of musicals in general. I've played in rock and roll bands and jazz bands, but musical theatre is very different, and performing in it is very different, and performing in it; well we found a device to get Stanley off the stage, which was probably a blessing for our viewers.
MM: This year, there have been a couple of things like that, which have been very satisfying. There's a whole episode that is just a chess game, and it's going to be breathtaking. That was another episode where we were confused, and some people were upset about it, but that's the episode, and it's just brilliant.
TV Zone: Do either of you still have a mental wish list for your characters?
MM: One of the principles of LEXX is that people don't develop. You don't want to become expansive all of a sudden or making improvements.
BD: I want the LEXX toilets in my home. I don't want to deal with toilet paper anymore. I think everybody should have a tongue in their bathroom, we'd save a lot of trees.
TV Zone: But Michael if you say characters can't grow or develop-
MM: They can develop like a photograph develops, where we see more and more of them. In terms of events, they're always at that fixed point when their characters were defined. So when I got memory back after having been a divine assassin for 2000 years, that is the defining moment of my relationship to the world, the reality that's discovered on the Lexx and my attachment to theses guys. The love slave transformation fixes the love slave transformation fixes the love slave in her state.
BD: And then the control of the most powerful destructive force in the 2 universes.
MM: Just because of a couple of little dildos giving up the deep secrets of the rebel forces and causing the destruction of a huge number of planets and billions of people is the constant state of Stanley Tweedle. For 790, it was a love slave injection into his tiny human brain, is what defines him.
TV Zone: Some of our readers who haven't seen LEXX yet must be wondering what we're talking about here.
MM: Tell them to watch the show!
TV Zone: At the beginning of the conversation, you alluded to the fact that this may be the final season of Lexx. In an ideal world, how long would you like the show to go on?
BD: There's some talk of a spin-off series, but that's all it is at the moment.
MM: If they do more Lexx, it should be a spin-off. Personally, I think they should go back 12,000 years ago and journey to the light universe and take the Brunnen-G, this militant culture whose sun is threatening to go supernova and they've got to find a new place to live. They go into the light universe, where they have battle the insect civilization, so it could be a very interesting series, a journey to the light universe. There are endless possibilities. Lexx is so much more than a set of characters.
Inerview with Xenia Seeberg[]
(OCR, proofreeding nedeed)
WNAT HAPPENS when a sexy alien love slave ends up in a Texas women's prison? That's just one of the bizarre events that viewers will see in the new season of LEXX, which recently began airing in the US. In the first episode, Little Blue Planet, the most powerful weapon of destruction in two universes comes to Earth along with its whacked-out crew. and the results are unpredictable to say the least.
With the series iust about to start its summer hiatus, German actress Xenia (Xev) Seeberg took some time out of her busy schedule to drop a few hints about the current season.
TV Zone: The big news this season is that the LEXX and its crew come to Earth.
XENIA SEEBERG. I think it s the best season we ve ever done. That's the good thing about knowing this will be the last season. On so many other series they do one two three seasons and when they get to the last one, it's like, okay we have to finish it off somehow and everyone is already in the mood of 'This is going downhill'. With this show, it's quite the opposite. Every-thing feels so much tighter like we're back to the very sharp sense of humour, much more ironic whereas Season Three was more drama, and we had an ongoing storyline, so it was a very different animal. Some people thought it was not quite so 'LEXX-ish,' while others who didn't like LEXX before thought it was more appeal-ing to them, but right now. I think we've got everything pretty well tied together. The fact that LEXX is going to Earth. that itself pretty much gives all the answers. You can just imagine what will happen to us there and how people will respond to LEXX, and how politicians will respond to us. Anything is possible, really.
TV Zone: Looking back over the history of the show, what has LEXX done for you as an actress?
XS At first, I wasn't so sure if I really wanted to take that character. I thought what is the point of playing the sex kitten on a show? That may be nice for maybe an episode, but not for an ongoing series. But I soon discovered that I pretty much had the freedom to help develop the character and take her wherever I wanted to. What I found appealing was knowing that so many women like this character, not because she's a babe or a sex kitten.
She has that background, fine, but she's also able to combine two things that we usually don't get to see that often. She has a certain look, and is also very strong and doesn't really care that much about that look it's just something that's given to her. But she has a really strong personality and I was really blown away by how the female fans responded to her. They'd say. 'We really need women like you and characters like yours who are so strong. and at the same time. very vulnerable and very human and open, and don't seem to just be the super-hero or this or that'. In that way. I'm not really fitting into any cliche which makes it good.
TV Zone: Does that put a lot of extra pressure on you, suddenly being a role model?
XS When I was cast, they had already seen 400 incredibly beautiful girls, but what they were really looking for was somebody who would understand that kind of humour and not be afraid of playing with it. I guess I like that dark sense of humour, and I think that's what they saw in this short movie I had made before that LEXX. It was a really weird movie, but it showed that I really didn't care about the looks at all, and they could see that I could maybe act (hope-fully) and that's why I got cast. So it was not so much the pressure that I had to be a role model, or a sexy babe all the time. I certainly don't want to try to stay even remotely decent looking, given the fact that we work incredibly long and hard hours.
TV Zone: On LEXX, you never really know what the producers are going to give you from one script to the next, do you?
XS. We don't know what we'll get from one week to the next, but in a way. we still have a lot of control. They'll ask us. 'What do you think of this?' and scripts get re-written if they're not really true to our characters. Everything is a surprise, but of course they stick to what really makes sense to us. Even now that we're going to Earth. and facing all those things are incredibly strange to us, everything is new, but it still makes sense. I was talking to somebody this morning who said. It looks so weird to see a police car on LEXX; it doesn't make sense!' I said, 'Actually, you'll be seeing an episode where you'll under-stand that it does make sense'. To see that combination of very earthly and then our characters is really neat and I love it.
TV Zone: What will viewers be seeing as far as your character is concerned this season?
XS. On one hand, Xev gets to experience pretty much the worst things that can Xev enjoys the feel of the captain's chair happen to a Human being on Earth. She also gets to experience things that pretty much everybody goes for in life at a certain point. The average Human be-ing wants the comfortable life, so we'll see how she deals with that, and how the gang deals with that. Right now, I haven't distanced myself enough from LEXX to really see it clearly. It's just one big thing at the moment. We raced through these first 18 episodes and I was not a private person at all, especially for the last two months. You wake up at 5:00 in the morning, you start with the char-acter, you finish at 10:00 and go home and study your lines for the next day, and you go to bed still being the character in those five hours of sleep. We worked a few weekends too. so when do you get to be a private person? Maybe you can make some phone calls over the weekend to some friends overseas. somewhere in Germany or in the States, but that's about it.
TV Zone: So what will you be doing for this two-month summer hiatus that starts today?
XS I think we all need to recharge our batteries: I certainly do. Of course I thought. I'll just jump onto the next project right away, and there were a few offers, but it really wasn't worth it. With one of them, I would have jumped right into next week, and that wasn't going to happen. The two very interesting offers came from Canada. Germany is very reluctant at the moment, because they just don t see me at all. They don't see me working, they lust know I'm somewhere in Canada doing this strange series called LEXX, which they don't understand. So I had two very nice offers and one was actually an American/ Canadian co-production. They were two features, but they start too late during my break and carry on until the end of Octo-ber, so I couldn't do them because I'm committed to be on LEXX until the very end.
TV Zone: If this does indeed turn out to be the final season, will you be sorry to see the show end, or are you a bit relieved?
XS: It's difficult to tell. I'm relieved that we have a break, but I'm not relieved that this will end because it's way too much pleas-ure to see how those episodes turn out. Sometimes while we're still working on it, you're so caught up in the working process, and it's hard work, that you don't really realize while you're doing it and then when you get to see it — we had three screenings, and they're just great. When you see that, you actually know what we were working for so hard. So for that reason, I wouldn't say I'm relieved to see it end? Sad? Yeah, maybe, but on the other hand, it will probably make sense.
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