‘She doubled down on danger’: Lucy Lawless on making a movie about a real-life warrior princess

Margaret Moth and Lucy Lawless: the names alone, alliterative and faintly fantastical, suggest larger-than-life superheroes. That isn’t too far from the truth. Moth, born Margaret Wilson in Gisborne, New Zealand in 1951, transformed herself into the woman she wanted to be. She cast off the blond cherubic sweetness of her childhood, adopted an all-black look from the tips of her punky hairdo to her combat boots, named herself after the insect that she most feared, and went to court to fight for her legal right to be sterilised. (“I’m not a breeder,” she said.) She went on to become an intrepid news camerawoman who sought out ever more dangerous assignments, and didn’t run for cover when she got there. On the West Bank, she was shot in the foot by an Israeli soldier. In Sarajevo, a sniper’s bullet destroyed her lower jaw. Only in a war zone, a colleague once observed, did she truly know who she was.

Now Lawless, a fellow New Zealander best known for playing Xena: Warrior Princess in the 1990s fantasy action series of the same name, has made her directorial debut with Never Look Away, a documentary about Moth, who died in 2010. The 56-year-old actor turned director could see the headlines before she had shot a frame of footage. “‘Warrior Princess on TV meets Warrior Princess in real life!’” she says, leaning across the table in a busy London cafe to make herself heard over the din. “Looks good in print, right? Even down to the ‘MM’ and ‘LL’ of it.”

Lawless as Xena: Warrior Princess. Photograph: Mca Tv/Renaissance/Kobal/Shutterstock

There are other superficial similarities. Both women took on new names (Lawless still goes by her first husband’s surname) and dyed their hair. The actor, whose natural colour is mousey blond, went Moth-black to play Xena. “Oh yeah!” she says, the coincidence only just hitting her. “It was the 1990s. That whole Gabriela Sabatini thing.”

But she dismisses any deeper connection with Moth. “We don’t have much in common,” she sniffs. “Don’t be fooled by the name. I’m not a bad girl.” Doesn’t occupying a docked Shell vessel for three days with six fellow Greenpeace activists to protest against drilling in the Arctic, as Lawless did in New Zealand in 2012, count for anything? “Yeah, but I’m an idealist. Margaret absolutely was not. She eschewed any kind of spirituality. Introspection was all woo-woo to her. Her attitude was: ‘Self-exploration? No thank you!’ The only way we’re the same is that curiosity can be more attractive to us than common sense.”

Lawless protesting with Greenpeace in New Zealand in 2012. Photograph: AP

She narrowly avoided prison time for her part in the Greenpeace protest, escaping with a fine and 120 hours of community service. Even that is shrugged off when I mention it now. “I broke the law knowingly. I knew the ramifications.” Like Moth, Lawless also has a track record for championing the oppressed and disfranchised. She was overjoyed when Xena: Warrior Princess was embraced by LGBTQ+ viewers because of Xena’s relationship with her companion, Gabrielle (Renee O’Connor), which was ambiguous then but which has since been confirmed by Lawless. “I was like, ‘That’s so cool!’ I was also a bit flummoxed. This was an acting gig where I got paid and it was fun but I didn’t really think about the effect on the audience at the time. Now I see that’s the alchemy of a show like Xena. A marginalised community can see it, relate to it and be inspired.” She calls it “a fascinating sociological event”.

It is for that reason that she looked uncomfortable while hosting Saturday Night Live in 1998, where cast members including Tina Fey joked about the show’s popularity among lesbian viewers. “It’s cringey,” Lawless admits. “Ugly, stupid stuff.” What was she thinking when Fey, dressed as a butch admirer, asked her out for a beer and a game of pool during her opening monologue? “I was looking for more. Like, ‘Is that the joke?’ You don’t crap on the fans. It was Bill Shatner who said to me, ‘Stick with the fans and they’ll stick with you.’”

She seems far happier talking about Never Look Away, which came to her via her producer husband, Robert Tapert, co-creator of Xena: Warrior Princess. Turning down the project when it was brought to him by a friend of Moth’s, he instead suggested his wife, who had never even thought about directing. “I didn’t choose this,” she says gravely. “The story chose me. I started making all these rash promises about how I could raise the money, promises I had no business making. I was possessed by Margaret!”

Margaret Moth covering the Gulf war in the early 1990s, as seen in Never Look Away. Photograph: Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Like its subject, Never Look Away hits the ground running. In the first few minutes, we learn that Moth took acid most weekends, threw herself into skydiving and rollerblading, and slept with much younger men. One of those, the late Jeff Russi, reminisces fondly in the film about his polyamorous relationship with her, which began when she was 30 and he was a high-school student of 17 working at a pizza joint in her neighbourhood. “There’s no way to soft-pedal that stuff so I put it right up front,” says Lawless. “That’s the least of it with Margaret. It’s like, ‘You think that’s bad? Now shit’s gonna get really crazy.’”

The film never passes judgment on its subject’s private life. “I didn’t want to convey any attitude about her drug habits or her sexual proclivities. Margaret was supremely non-judgmental herself. My hope is that people will leave the cinema discussing and disagreeing about who it was that they just spent 90 minutes with.” There is never any doubt, though, that Moth is rendered heroic by her determination to expose injustice and atrocity. As Lawless puts it: “She was a bad girl who walked on the side of the angels.”

Descriptions of her tend to be variations on a theme. Russi calls her “the lion-tamer” and “the queen of the night”. Others describe her as “fearless”, “ballsy” and “kick-ass”. One of her mottoes was “No regrets”; another was “Don’t be boring”. And she wasn’t. Having become the first news camerawoman in her native country in the 1970s, she moved to the US in 1980 and was eventually hired by CNN. She found herself – in both senses of that phrase – in Kuwait during the first Gulf war in 1990, where she smoked cigars with the US General Norman Schwartzkopf.

Her cataclysmic injury in Sarajevo occurred just two years later. A medic said the damage was so severe that it would probably be better if she died. But that wasn’t Moth’s style. Instead, she joked about going back to Sarajevo to look for her teeth.

It is here that the title of Lawless’s film acquires its second meaning. Not much footage exists of Moth before the shooting (“Who wants to interview a camerawoman?” reasons Lawless), whereas the documentary draws on interviews with her after surgery. She dabs away the drool as she speaks, her slurred delivery making it difficult for her to be understood even by her closest colleagues. It feels as if Lawless is daring us to look away, forcing the audience to face the traumas in Moth’s life, and not merely the badass swagger.

‘I was always looking for what Margaret was fighting against’ … Lawless. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Not that she lost that either. Though CNN wanted to restrict her to safer assignments, she refused. As her colleague Stefano Kotsonis says in the film: “She didn’t do less war after she was shot. She did more. She doubled down on danger.”

When her number really was up, she was disappointed that it was cancer. “I would have liked to think I’d have gone out with a bit more flair,” she said, a year before her death at the age of 58.

Even after making Never Look Away, Lawless doesn’t feel she has fully unpicked the enigma of Margaret Moth, and what drove her. “People call her ‘dangerously authentic’, but here she is creating this false persona. She’s very hard to quantify. She’s still a real mystery to me in some ways.” Some interviewees mention the sense of a deep anger within her. There is testimony in the film from Moth’s siblings about the violence meted out to all of them by their mother, whose eyes would turn black “like a demon” when she set about them with belts, hairbrushes and leather shaving strops.

“I was always looking for what Margaret was fighting against,” Lawless says. “You want to jump to the easy but terrifying conclusion that she was sexually abused as a child. But she absolutely was not.” The physical abuse sounds harrowing enough. “Yeah, her siblings think it was discipline, but it’s violence without a doubt. What there was in that family was this relentless dearth of love. And it was this that became Margaret’s superpower.”

Moth in Never Look Away. Photograph: Courtesy of Sundance Institute

The woman who emerged from that punishing childhood was unsentimental but never unfeeling. “She didn’t want children,” Lawless says. “But, in the end, she found her children. They were the children of war, and she lived for them. When all the beauty and the sex and the drugs and the punk music was gone, and the roller-skating and the skydiving was gone, there was only telling the story of the children. That was all she cared about. Margaret’s purpose was to represent the non-combatants of war. Unfortunately, she was the first in a wave of what has now become de rigueur, which is shooting the messenger – literally.”

With leaders like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin undermining the authority of the press, the documentary feels both urgent and pertinent. “I want it to bring honour back to the profession of news-gathering,” she says. “Everybody’s dumping on mainstream media and people don’t believe anything they see.”

Lawless surely doesn’t intend for audiences to follow in Moth’s footsteps in any literal sense. Few of us, if the bombs were falling, would scramble on to the roof to get a better look, as Moth did. So what does she hope viewers will take from Never Look Away? “I want people to realise that the thing you most desire, your unexplored potential, is only just out of reach, and if you reach a little higher you can have it. That’s the movie’s message: reach a little higher.”