AT: So the show draws a lot of comparison to previous hit fantasy shows Hercules and Xena, but perhaps not rightfully so. Was that discussed during the initial production of the show?
Well, Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert very successfully produced Hercules and Xena for many, many years. Now, they’re executive producers on LOTS. I think some of the comparisons came very naturally from people who were fans of Rob and Sam’s work and again, filming in New Zealand which stems out of the production facilities and relationships that they created. That’s a very natural comparison that one would make and this is a fantasy show as those were fantasy shows. I’m not surprised by the comparison, but I think the shows are very, very different in tone. I think we do have a lot of humor on the show and we pride ourselves on humor but we tend to play everything for real and we tend to play everything very high stakes and that is just our show. That’s just what LOTS is and that’s what works for us. It’s about a character on a quest essentially who is trying to save the world against extraordinary obstacles so we try to never let it be too jokey. Xena and Hercules were wonderfully jokey and funny and winked at themselves. That style and that tone was successful for those shows. We have some of the same artists working on the show, but it’s a very different writing staff and a different approach that we’ve taken. And again, you brought up the source material. The source material, which we don’t adhere to slavishly, we respect. And the source material, it’s not heavy, but it is very high stakes, so it doesn’t feel right to have our characters be too jokey.
AT: Casting the hero of all heroes must have been really tough, but I think Craig Horner manages to bring something in that isn’t just brute strength. How is it writing for Richard’s character?
Well, I think we’ve gotten to know him over the course of a couple years and when we started with the show we were all new to each other. Craig had done some work before but this was his first big show. Over time, we’ve gotten to know what his strengths are. It’s been a process of discovery that I think has gotten better and as we’ve gotten to know each other and as we’ve gotten to know the character that is in some ways different from the character in the book. For instance, we had a very young actor in this role and so we took the point of view in season one that he was a young and somewhat reluctant hero who was thrust into this role by fate and circumstance. It wasn’t something that he initially chose. We tried to be honest too. What would it be like for a young man who grew up without magic to suddenly be thrust into this world where people are telling him that he has this great destiny? We tried to stick to the essence of the character, which is his incredible honesty and his want to do the right thing. We wanted to make him human and allow him to make mistakes, which I think he did more of in the first season. In season two he becomes more of a fully formed hero and yet he still has that vulnerability and that’s a real strength of Craig’s because is in real life he’s a very caring guy so that’s something we could naturally tap into. He’s not just the guy who can beat people up or win a sword fight. He’s a guy who, sometimes to his own detriment, will find himself putting aside what he knows is the larger quest and the larger stakes because he literally cannot let somebody go unhelped who needs his help.
AT: The strong role of the women is really appealing. Kahlan and Cara are such fun characters to watch as women who just kick ass.
Yes. On LOTS, women kick ass. We really really enjoy that. We always assume in the writer’s room that Kahlan and Cara are not damsels who need to be rescued and they are almost just as often the rescuers as the rescuees. It’s actually been really fun to explore the relationship of those two characters together because as you watch the season unfold they started off very weary of each other and in somewhat of a competitive and confrontational mode and they grow to mutually respect each other but what they definitely have in common is an unwavering desire to protect Richard and help him in his quest and the muscle to back it up. Now having said that, Cara is a very particular kind of woman and Kahlan, while she can really kick ass and you would not want to tangle with her, she has a real vulnerability. She’s a real woman and though she’s noble enough not to indulge it, in a weepy way, she really wrestles everyday with not really being able to have a normal life with the man she loves. And Cara, she’ll just kick the piss out of anyone.
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AT: Speaking of Cara, it really seems like she’s starting to regain her sense of human emotions. Will we continue to see that evolve?
Well the idea of Cara was that she was a woman who, as we demonstrated early on in season, had really been stripped of her humanity to be able to with stand pain figuratively and literally, that’s one of the interesting things about the Mord Sith and that whole mythology. And where we’d never like to see her indulge and be wishy washy, we would like to see her slowly regain her humanity and that means dealing with love and loss but if you notice at the end of it, she was heartbroken and she did have real feelings for Leo (who was killed) that she couldn’t quite admit to herself or to him. But in the end she sucks it up and says, “Let’s get back to it.”