Do we like Lucy Lawless?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Years of showing up for LGBTQ+ fans and the climate, a hands-on price paid for it, and nothing harmful in her own words that turned up.
Lucy Lawless grew up in Mount Albert, Auckland, in a stable home where her father was the local mayor. By her own account her mum opposed the 1981 Springboks tour, the family copped bomb threats, and that is what turned her into an activist. At 18 she bolted for London with little money, and the rest is Xena: Warrior Princess.
The big stoush came in 2012. She and six Greenpeace activists climbed the drilling tower of Shell's Noble Discoverer ship at Port Taranaki to stop it heading for the Arctic, and stayed up there for four days before police got them down. She said at the time that people needed to “stand up while we still can.”
The court result in 2013: the original charge of unauthorised entry into a restricted port zone gave way to a guilty plea to being unlawfully on a ship. Each activist got 120 hours of community work and a $651.44 reparation bill to the port, and the bid for more than $600,000 for Shell Todd Oil was thrown out. She called it “a total victory” and joked she'd do her hours in a public toilet near you.
On the harm check, she's clean in everything we found. She has told interviewers it's an honour to be an LGBT+ icon, turns up to pride events like Sydney's Mardi Gras, and was ambassador to the first New Zealand LGBTI Awards in 2018. We found nothing from her on trans issues either way, so that's a gap, not a tick.
She's also not shy about calling out people she's worked with. In August 2024 she hit back at her old Hercules co-star Kevin Sorbo over his posts about Kamala Harris and the UK riots, and shared her own account of a 1995 conversation in which she says he spoke dismissively of Nicole Brown Simpson. That's her account of what he said, and the NME piece carried no reply from him.
Recent work is on the right side too. She directed the documentary Never Look Away, about CNN camerawoman Margaret Moth, which premiered at Sundance in 2024, and has said she was stretched to breaking point making it. Nothing new on her lately that we could verify, and no hint of her working with the culture-war crowd.