The continuation of Spartacus on Starz is inherently bittersweet because of the loss of Andy Whitfield, but Lucy Lawless can keep things light. When Starz presented the new "Spartacus: Vengeance" to the Television Critics Association, Lawless took questions about her Honey Badger segments. I followed up with Lawless about the new and crazier Lucretia in the current season.

Crave Online: Lucretia looks crazy. Is she a little crazy this year?

Lucy Lawless: Well, you would be crazy, wouldn't you? Your unborn child has been unceremoniously stabbed within yourself. You've lost your husband, you've lost everything, so she may or may not be crazy. I'm going to let you decide.

Crave Online: Do you get to play that the whole year?

Lucy Lawless: No, because that would be very tiresome very quickly. Somebody's crazy, that’s interesting for about three seconds, but you quickly want to get back to the characters you know and love. That took a bit of doing actually, figuring that out. I found that extremely challenging.

Crave Online: Are they making Lucretia pick up some weapons and get her hands dirty?

Lucy Lawless: No, but I am on the receiving end of some very bad treatment this season.

Crave Online: We love how outrageous the show can be.

Lucy Lawless: Yeah, continues to be completely outrageous, I promise you. Again, they even manage to shock me.

Crave Online: Do you find yourself topping yourself and the things you've done earlier?

Lucy Lawless: Yes, I did, and very recently too. Before I came over here, I went through something that was down such a dark tunnel. It was a bad experience and I was so proud of it, and I hope that it comes out on screen as good as it felt terrible to make.

Crave Online: Which episode is that in? We’ll look for it.

Lucy Lawless: Six.

Crave Online: Is Honey Badger more famous than Xena now?

Lucy Lawless: [Laughs] I don't know. It's a threat. It's a serious threat.

Crave Online: Xena is on Netflix now. Do you hear from new viewers and fans who are seeing it that way for the first time?

Lucy Lawless: I don't hear anything. I'm analog but it stresses me out. I don't Twitter or anything because to try to promote a virtual self is so stressful to me, therefore I'm not going to do it. I'd rather go and make Honey Badger and be a dork and laugh my ass off. That's the real me.

Crave Online: If this is the last season for Lucretia, what kind of character would you like to play next?

Lucy Lawless: I continue to want to play morally imperiled characters, people that you guys think are bad. You know what? I'd love to play a victim. I love to play the vulnerability and that's what I love about Lucretia, is her vulnerability.

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She Magazine interviews Lucy for its 13th anniversary issue.

You can read it online here

Does she have her own private wi-fi connection to the gods? Tonight's episode of Spartacus: Vengeance finds Lucy Lawless' character, Lucretia, being treated like a superstar by the citizens of Capua. They believe she's divinely blessed — how else to explain her narrow escape from death during the bloody slave revolt? — and that she can tap into the wisdom of Mount Olympus. It sure seems that way. Before long, Lucretia starts spouting prophecy.

"She's no Tim Tebow," says Lawless. "Lucretia does not believe the gods are sticking their fingers in her personal business, but she is a widow with no means of support who is surrounded by enemies and desperate for survival. So she works it." And eventually that'll pay off — big time. "By the end of the season, Lucretia will get a new man," Lawless reveals. "In fact, after much tribulation, all her dreams will come true. All of them."

Lawless is also doing well in the dream department. Spartacus, shot in her homeland of New Zealand, has finally brought her serious acclaim as an actress, plus another juicy gig — she's joining the killer cast (Holly Hunter, Elisabeth Moss) of the BBC miniseries Top of the Lake, directed by Oscar winner Jane Campion. But it wasn't too long ago that Lawless was living in L.A. in a post-Xena funk. She and her best pal, Tony-winning actress Marissa Jaret Winokur, "would go to the shopping mall and sit in the vibrating chairs at the Brookstone store, stuffing ourselves with muffins and crying about our s---ty careers," recalls Lawless with a laugh. "I had to move back home to become successful again!"

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What a different vision these two stars of "Spartacus: Vengeance" offer in person.

Here is Lucy Lawless: In her Starz adventure-action series, she builds on worldwide fame as Xena, Warrior Princess, by playing wily Lucretia, widow of the Roman sports impresario. Her "ludus," an extreme training camp for gladiators, was where Spartacus had been enslaved. Transported from first century B.C. Capua to modern-day Manhattan, Lawless, 43 — in bright sweater and snug jeans — is pretty, girlish and full of laughs.

Alongside her for this recent interview is Liam McIntyre, who this season is taking over the role of Spartacus. Unlike the raging Thracian out to forge an army and topple the Roman Empire, McIntyre is chipper, affable and ready with wisecracks.

The first season concluded two years ago in a brutal rebellion led by Spartacus at the ludus. Roman blood flowed and his masters' bodies dropped. Among the many victims were seemingly Lucretia.

Now the saga picks up just a few weeks later with the gladiators having made their escape and Spartacus plotting widespread payback to their oppressors. And Lucretia makes her shocking return. "She's lost everything," says Lawless. "She's lost her husband, her baby, her lover, the house, her status — and her marbles."

"Spartacus: Vengeance" retains a potent mix of hyper-realism and epic fantasy, with generous helpings of violence, nudity, sex and other visual pizzazz.

But real-life tragedy, too, is a part of the story. Andy Whitfield, who originated the role of Spartacus, announced in March 2010 that he was stricken with non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. That May, a six-episode prequel concentrating on characters other than Spartacus was set for the following year, to give Whitfield time off for treatment. But a few months later when the cancer returned, he announced his departure from the show. Last September, he died at age 39.

"Being a fan of the show, I loved Andy's Spartacus so much," says McIntyre, now 29. "He wasn't just an action hero. In my auditions I tried to capture the heart that I felt in Spartacus due to Andy's great performance."

"The show needed someone who could not only carry the role that Andy had created," Lawless adds, "but also bring something of his own that was authentic."

But McIntyre was hardly Spartacus-brawny when he got to the set in New Zealand for his audition. "I'd never liked my body," he confides, "and my nightmare was to be filmed in underwear. I was no body builder. I was just this guy who liked sports and video games."

It took months of grueling training for McIntyre to bulk up to Spartacus proportions — "that kind of intense exercise is horrible," he cringes — and only then, finally, to clench the role. His selection to inherit Spartacus' leather Speedo was announced last January.

The ailing Whitfield supported McIntyre as the recasting choice, and offered to meet with his successor, "which I thought was amazingly big-hearted considering everything he was going through." Whitfield's failing health prevented their getting together, "but we exchanged emails," says McIntyre, "and I feel very blessed to have those."

The Australian-born McIntyre, who made his U.S. television debut two years ago in HBO's miniseries "The Pacific," became an actor in an unlikely way, while studying business in Ireland on a student-exchange program. A chum inveigled him to take a role in a school production, and after first resisting, he got the bug.

"One day during a performance it all clicked," says McIntyre. "And then, when 'Gladiator' came out, I wanted to be in a film like that more than anything. Now, here I am!"

When shooting on "Spartacus" began, McIntyre eased into the routine.

"Bringing Liam in was as easy a transition as it could be," says Lawless, who had weathered the series' uncertainty both as a principal player and as the wife of executive producer Rob Tapert. "Because of who Liam is, and because everybody else is so good at their jobs, it smoothed over the discombobulation that comes from having a star disappear from your roster."

But that doesn't mean Whitfield was forgotten, or he isn't missed as Spartacus fights on.

"This great journey that I get to go on now — there are times when I just get so sad 'cause it seems so unfair that someone who had this exact experience a couple of years ago isn't here to enjoy it now," says McIntyre, his eyes damp in a way you wouldn't associate with Spartacus. "It's a shame."

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SPARTACUS: VENGEANCE, which premieres tonight on Starz at 10 PM, is actually the second season of the SPARTACUS series, even though it’s the third year of the show. Series creator and executive producer Steven S. DeKnight understands how this might cause some head-scratching.

In 2010's SPARTACUS: BLOOD AND SAND, Andy Whitfield starred as the famous historical figure. The season followed him through his early days of being enslaved, being trained as a gladiator and finally leading a revolt at the Ludus (gladiator training camp) that left its owner Batiatus (John Hannah) definitively dead and Batiatus' pregnant wife Lucretia, played by Lucy Lawless, probably mortally wounded but still twitching.

Sadly, while Season Two was being planned, Whitfield was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Waiting for Whitfield to return to the show after he underwent treatment, the SPARTACUS company decided to do SPARTACUS: GODS OF THE ARENA, a prequel season of six episodes, which ran in 2011, showing the earlier days of Lucretia and Batiatus and introducing Dustin Clare as Gannicus, a fighter who later figures into Spartacus' story.

Then Whitfield's remission ended and it became unhappily clear that his health would not allow him to return to the series. Whitfield passed away on September 11, 2011, but gave his blessing to his SPARTACUS colleagues to recast the role and continue making the show. SPARTACUS: VENGEANCE went forward with Liam McIntyre as Spartacus.

DeKnight understands how the fractured timeline can lead to mix-ups. "VENGEANCE is actually Season Two," he explains. "It confuses everybody."

Between them, DeKnight and Lawless have enough genre street cred to give rise to a two-person convention. Lawless in fact will be at a Creation Convention in Burbank this weekend honoring her indelible title character in XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS; she also played the Cylon D'Anna in BATTLESTAR GALACTICA.

DeKnight has been a writer, producer and director on BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, ANGEL and SMALLVILLE. They tease each other often during a private interview during the Television Critics Association press tour at the Langham Hotel inPasadena.

DeKnight's fellow executive producer and Lawless' husband Robert Tapert is just around the corner, giving interviews of his own

ASSIGNMENT X: If you weren't going into Season Two, would you have liked to extend GODS OF THE ARENA?

STEVE DeKNIGHT: When I first suggested the idea of the prequel, I suggested a two-hour movie to keep the show alive, but it really didn't help anybody, and then Rob suggested four hours, and that didn't quite work with the writing, it wasn't long enough for a convoluted story, and it was too long for a nice short story, and then Starz wanted to do six episodes, and that was just right. I think any longer, GODS OF THE ARENA wouldn't have worked, and any shorter, it wouldn't have worked.

AX: In SPARTACUS: GODS OF THE ARENA, you had the bookend sequences that began and ended with the events at the end of Season One, so when does VENGEANCE, Season Two, start in terms of the story?

DeKNIGHT: Somewhere six to eight weeks after the breakout in Season One.

AX: Is that enough time for Lucretia to have recovered from being nearly killed, or is she still recovering?

LUCY LAWLESS: Evidently she is not fully recovered. We find her when she's in quite a state. I loved [acting] it, but I got a little bit lost inside myself [laughs], so it was an uncomfortable two weeks of actual madness.

DeKNIGHT: Rob must have loved that.

LAWLESS: Oh, he didn't notice.

[Both laugh.]

LAWLESS: I just had no reference, so I did way too much research that I don't know was particularly helpful, because I lost my bearings a little. I needed somebody else to take the reins at times – the director being the one to have the taste of how to play this thing. He reined me in.

AX: Now, because Lucretia didn't run off with Spartacus et al –

LAWLESS: I wasn't invited, okay?

AX: Can you tease at all how she's worked back into the story and how much of a challenge was it to work her back into the story?

DeKNIGHT: It worked really organically. Lucretia originally was supposed to die at the end of Season One. We loved the character so much that Starz asked, "Is there any way to bring her back?" And Rob called me up and said, "Starz would really like to bring Lucy back." I said, "So would I – but she has to die! There's no way to bring her back!" Rob said, "Okay." And that night, I had an idea and I called Rob the next morning: "I've got an idea of how to bring Lucy back that I think is really, really juicy." And it was really down to the wire. That's why we filmed it both ways at the end of Season One, one where she's twitching and one where she's clearly dead, because we weren't really sure at that time which way we were going to go. It was actually very natural. She basically never leaves the Ludus. That's where we find her when we come back and I don’t think it's giving a lot away that we re-use Batiatus' Ludus in a different way this season and she's part and parcel with the Ludus.

AX: How is Liam McIntyre different from the late Andy Whitfield in playing Spartacus?

DeKNIGHT: With Liam, we were looking for someone to fill those sandals. We weren't looking for an Andy clone, because quite frankly, nobody could replace Andy. He was such a singular talent. We were looking for somebody that had similar qualities. And what was great about Andy is that he had this quality of compassion that was really important for the character. When we were auditioning people, one of the things we told the casting directors is, "Spartacus may go into a mad rage and kill everybody, but it's not from a place of anger, it's from a place of a wounded heart," and that kind of pain and compassion is what we were looking for, and that's what Liam had in his auditions. And then there was a lot of talk about, should we write Spartacus specifically for Liam, should we change the way we’re writing him? And we decided, no, we'll write Spartacus as Spartacus, and Liam will bring his own [qualities].

LAWLESS: Liam has a leadership quality that I think is really important to Spartacus now that he's out on the road and he's got to bring all these disparate peoples together as an army. Liam is very outgoing in that way, so I think his strengths play really well to the requirements of the role.

AX: Besides recuperating from her injuries, how is Lucretia different than we've seen her before?

LAWLESS: She's a kinder, gentler Lucretia [laughs]. She wants everyone to love her, because they'd better, because something bad's going to happen if she doesn't find a friend, and quick. Fortunately,Olympia's around, and she should be an easy mark. [Lucretia] does find a little friend, somebody she's never paid much attention to before, and he falls in love with her. By the end of the season, all Lucretia's dreams will come true.

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