Renée O'Connor spent six seasons a step behind Lucy Lawless, talking, and by the end the talker had become the quieter and harder of the two. It is the role most people know her in, and it is better than the wigs suggest.
Fi1m perspective
Gabrielle arrives in Xena: Warrior Princess (1995) as a farm girl with stories to tell and nobody to tell them to, and attaches herself to a former warlord who plainly does not want her. O'Connor plays the early seasons as a talker: quick, eager, a little too loud, the person who has heard the legend and now wants to live inside it. The programme is loud and silly and she does not pretend otherwise. What she does across 134 episodes is rarer. The bard becomes an Amazon warrior, and the eagerness drains out of her face a season at a time, so that late in the run she can stand still in a scene and say nothing and we know what it has cost her.
We did not expect to be moved by a loud syndicated action show, and we were, and much of that is O'Connor. The friendship at the centre of the series only works if the second person in it is allowed to change, and she changes more than anyone else on screen. Lawless has the bigger part and the bigger voice. O'Connor is the one the writers use to measure what six years of following a warrior has done to a person, and she lets it show without ever asking for sympathy. She also directed two episodes.
She came to it the ordinary way, through commercials, Disney Channel work and small parts in the late 1980s and early 1990s, then the television film Hercules and the Lost Kingdom (1994), where she played Deianeira for the same producers, Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi. After the series ended in 2001 she set up ROC Productions and moved behind the camera, directing shorts and features, among them Words Unspoken (2010), which she wrote, produced, directed and appeared in. Her stated reason was blunt: "I wanted to direct something where I didn't have to compromise to a studio... I could really just be authentic in my own voice and in my own visions." She has also played Lady Macbeth on stage, in 2002 and again in 2019.
The caveat is that the screen work since has been small: independent films and supporting parts, A Question of Faith (2017) among them, rather than anything with a studio behind it. We have not seen enough of it to say whether the stillness she found in the last seasons of Xena survived the move to smaller rooms. What we can say is that if you know her only as the village girl, you know the best of her that is widely available, and there is a great deal of it. A hundred and thirty-four episodes is a long time to stay honest in a silly show, and she managed it.
Biography
Renée O'Connor is an American actress, producer and director. She is known for playing Gabrielle in the television series Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), appearing in all 134 episodes, and for directing two episodes of the series.
Born Evelyn Renee O'Connor on 15 February 1971 in Houston, Texas, and raised in nearby Katy, she attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston. Her early screen credits include The Adventures of Huck Finn (1993) and an episode of NYPD Blue (1993). She also appeared as Deianeira in the television film Hercules and the Lost Kingdom (1994).
After Xena, O'Connor founded ROC Productions. She has directed and produced short films and other projects, and has appeared in series including Criminal Minds (2005) and films such as Boogeyman 2 (2007) and Bitch Slap (2009).
