Lucy Lawless is a legend in the minds of genre film and TV fans. Thanks to her iconic run on the cult series, “Xena: Warrior Princess,” Lawless is always brought up by fans as potential actresses to join other genre franchises. However, in a recent interview with Metro, the actress is concerned that overzealous fans linking her to Gina Carano could have cost her a “Star Wars” role.
Speaking in a recent interview, Lucy Lawless talked about the situation involving her and “The Mandalorian.” And by “situation,” what is meant is that fans immediately began to bring up Lawless as a possible replacement when it was announced that Gina Carano’s ‘Mando’ character was being written off the series after the actress posted some controversial tweets that were seemingly anti-Semitic.
It appears that Lawless was actually talking with Lucasfilm about a non-“Mandalorian” role in the “Star Wars” franchise when the Carano stuff was happening, and the actress thinks that being linked to that situation by all the fervent fancasting, might’ve cost her the other role.
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“Well to be honest with you, I was already in discussions about something on – it wasn’t ‘The Mandalorian’ – something ‘Star Wars’-affiliated,” Lawless said. “It might have hurt me in some way because then they couldn’t hire me because it would seem to be pandering to… I’m just guessing here, I don’t know anything, but in some ways, it can be unhelpful, because if they pander to this fan group, then how are you going to pander to every other fan group, do you know what I mean?”
Lawless added that she thought that being linked to Carano’s role by fans “became political” and might have soured her in the eyes of the Lucasfilm executives.
Fancasting is nothing new, obviously. Well before the internet was even as ubiquitous as it is now and social media was nothing more than USENET servers, fans have gotten together to posit possible actors for genre film roles. While most of the time, fans are wildly wrong about who would be best for a role, sometimes they do hit the nail on the head (most famously with Patrick Stewart as Professor X in the ‘X-Men’ films). But it appears the fans’ enthusiasm about Lawless joining “Star Wars” might have had the opposite effect.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like we’ll know what role Lawless was in discussions for, nor does it appear the actress is slated to appear in the galaxy far, far away. But hey, she’s always going to be Xena, right? And “The Mandalorian” is going to continue on without her or Carano, as Season 3 is expected sometime next year.
