Kevin Smith

Ares arrives in Xena: Warrior Princess (1995) and does something most villains in that show never manage: he lowers his voice. Around him the warlords bellow and the wigs do their worst. Smith leans in instead. He plays the god of war as a man who has lost a favourite pupil and takes it personally, half flirting and half threatening, and who regards Xena's repentance as an insult aimed at him. The performance lives in the pause before the line rather than the line itself.

He was a New Zealand actor first, a rugby player who fell into acting after an injury put him in front of an audition, and he worked in local theatre and television from the late 1980s, in series such as Gloss and Marlin Bay and the film Desperate Remedies (1993). In 1995 he joined Hercules: The Legendary Journeys as Iphicles, the hero's half-brother, and the same year took on Ares in Xena. For the next six years he played the god across Hercules, Xena and Young Hercules (1998) at the same time, until 2001, with time left over to lead a run of New Zealand television films as John Lawless in Lawless (1999). He died in 2002, as a Hollywood part was being prepared for him.

The trick of Ares is that Smith plays a different god depending on whose show he is on. Opposite Kevin Sorbo on Hercules he is an aggressor with a grudge; opposite Lucy Lawless he is a suitor, and everything is about winning her back. Smith understood this better than the writing sometimes did. His own account of the part was that Ares "isn't evil" and is "just a working stiff who goes home after a hard day at the office", and that is what makes him funny: the sulk of a middle manager who has been passed over. In the flatter hours of the first season we found ourselves waiting for him, and cheering up when the black leather came round the corner, because nobody else in the cast could make a threat sound like an invitation.

The reservation is the obvious one. Nearly everything he did that anyone outside New Zealand has seen is syndicated fantasy television, made quickly, and the material rarely asked him for more than charm and menace in alternating scenes. Lawless suggests there was more, but we have not seen enough of it to say how much. He was still finding out what else he could do when the chance went.

If you want to know why a supporting player in a show about wigs and thunderbolts is still talked about, pick any Xena episode with Ares in it and watch him wait for his cue. He is never in a hurry. The shows around him usually were.