L: Lucy Lawless as Xena Warrior Princess. C: The UK riots. R: Kevin Sorbo as Hercules (Syfy/Getty)
Kevin Sorbo, who starred in ’90s TV series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and Lucy Lawless, who starred in sapphic Hercules spin-off Xena: Warrior Princess, have moved in very different directions politically since their shows ended.
Lawless and Sorbo have had public clashes over their political beliefs around human rights issues, with Donald Trump fan Sorbo leaning distinctly to the right.
Xena: Warrior Princess has a large LGBTQ+ fan base, due to the fact that main characters Xena and Gabrielle were initially portrayed as queer-coded, and their relationship was heavily implied to be romantic – with this becoming more and more overt as the series continued.
In 2021, Lawless condemned her former co-star Kevin Sorbo for “enabling” the Capitol rioters on January 6th after he reshared a debunked conspiracy theory that suggested those involved in storming the US Capitol were actually left-wing Antifa supporters.
Sorbo wrote: “They don’t look like patriots to me…”
Lawless replied: “No, peanut, they are not patriots. They are your flying monkeys, home-grown terrorists, QAnon actors. They are the douchebags that go out and do the evil bidding of people like you, who like to wind them up like toys and let them do their worst.”
Now, the two stars of the hit shows appear to be clashing on social media again, this time over the recent UK race riots.
Sorbo, who starred in more than 100 episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, as well as several episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess, posted a false image of three men, two of whom were white, and one a person of colour – suggested by the picture to be Muslim.
He captioned the image: “This is what’s happening in the UK right now.”
Each man’s image was accompanied with a crime and the jail sentence they purportedly received.
The two white men were charged with the respective crimes of posting a racist comment on Facebook and selling anti-immigration stickers, for which they received jail sentences of 15 weeks and 24 months, while the man of colour allegedly “repeatedly raped” a 12-year-old girl and did not get any prison time, according to the image.
“This is what’s happening in the UK right now,” Sorbo, who does not live in Britain, claimed alongside the post.
His tweet has more than 100 million impressions, nearly 35,000 retweets and approximately 107,000 likes. It was re-shared by tech billionaire and owner of X/Twitter Elon Musk, who has been accused of stoking racial tensions in the UK “at a dangerous time”, despite also not living in Britain.
Although Xena: Warrior Princess star Lucy Lawless has not commented specifically on the riots, her X account does show retweets and posts that are sympathetic to immigrants, people of colour and Muslims.
She reposted a video that was apparently filmed in Manchester showing a “mob surrounding and attacking a Black man” with the original tweet suggesting that everyone involved should be arrested, and also posted a meme used often by anti-racist campaigners to illustrate that the top one per cent of society tend to use immigrants and “foreigners” as scapegoats.
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