Jennifer spoke about getting the role of Amarice. "I decided I`d love to see the country," Sky recalls, "and I thought it would be really great to go there and play something really wild, like one of the Amazons."
Several callbacks later, Sky was off to New Zealand to film her first two Xena episodes as Amarice. "I really didn`t have that much of an idea about Xena or about the Amazons," she says, "it was all a bit over my head at the time. But it sounded really cool."
"They told me that I was definitely going to be doing two episodes," she says of her initial trip. Those two episodes were the fourth season shows Endgame and Ides of March. "I remember when I finished those, I was crying when I went back to get the plane, thinking, `Oh that`s it, I`ll never be here again!` At the time, it seemed like a really big deal. I had all my friends seeing me off at the airport; we were all crying and they were all waving from the balcony. I was being an actor, and being really dramatic... it was very funny. But then three weeks later, I was back. I had no idea what I was getting myself into!"
The plan was to introduce a young semi regular character for the younger elements of the audience to watch. After her initial batch of season 5 episodes, four more episode planned for her, however, she was only in one more - Them Bones, Them Bones as the lead role in Cleopatra 2525 came up. Jennifer mentions what it was like to film, and made a few interesting comments about the differences and similarities between XENA and CLEO.
"Both Xena and Cleo are dark shows," Sky points out. "When Xena films inside, they always use low lighting, and the underworld on Cleo is also a dark place. But the sets and environments are all different, and of course the costumes."
There`s also another major difference between Xena and Cleo, one that most audiences wouldn`t even think of. "This is going to sound really funny" says Sky, "but the smell is different! On Xena, they use a lot of frankincense, a very potent incense, to create the atmosphere. On Cleo, we use dry ice machines and pyrotechnics, which have a very different smell. Things are different in those ways, but of course the filming is just as high quality on both shows. We have that really gorgeous film look in both Cleo and Xena, where a lot of the colours are really cinematically appealing and beautiful."
Jennifer went on to discuss which episodes on XENA she enjoyed worked on - and is another actor who loved working with Ted Raimi! "I really loved my first Xena episode Endgame," she says, "because that was my first time working with Lucy and Renee. I loved doing Animal Attraction, too, because I liked working with Ted Raimi. I think he`s a really amazing actor and I think I actually learned a lot from him as a comedian. Sometimes he would be doing a fight scene or something, and I`d really be paying attention. I`d sit behind the video monitor during his scene and watch, and I`d just laugh and laugh because he was so funny. So Animal Attraction was really my favourite Xena episode to work on because it was a comedy."
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