Kevin Smith (Ares)

(Note: There are spoilers for Chakram and Seeds of Faith/the paternity of Xena's baby in this report. Read with care if you haven't seen those episodes yet!)

I first got to see Kevin Smith at the charity breakfast on Saturday morning, a few hours before his stage appearance. Despite being a little worse for wear from the cabaret partying the night before, he was a great sport with all the fans clamoring for pictures and a handshake. I noticed something fun about Kevin; when he's about to move on to the next table he slips into major charmer mode: his accent suddenly gets twice as thick as he answers everyone's goodbyes with "G'day," "No worries, mate," and similar Down Under-sounding phrases. He turned on the same charm at the convention when he talked to the people in the question line. What a smoothie!

When asked on stage about whether he spends much time reading sites or fanfic about Ares, Kevin says he tries to avoid it, that he doesn't think it's a good thing to look at himself too much. "Heaven forbid you start to like it," he said, "You'd never make it out of the house!"

Kevin "complained" (not really) about Gabrielle's growing fighting abilities, especially with those sais Renee's now waving around. "When it was just the staff, there was just one thing to watch. Now there's stuff all over." He was in awe of how good Renee is with her weapons. He said he arrives on set and has to get a refresher from the stunt coordinator. "How do you do the twirly thing? That? OK, I'm good for one of those."

But stage fighting with Lucy is no picnic for Kevin, either. When the fights are being filmed, Kevin said that Lucy yells the whole time and really gets into the battle, but that she's such a nice person that Kevin instinctively wants to say "WHY are we fighting?!? Baby, put those things down."

When asked about the difficulties of working with special effects, he used as an example the scene in Seeds of Faith when he gave Gabrielle some god-glow ("groovy stuff," he called it). To the actors, Kevin was just waving his hands in front of blissed-out-looking Renee, and Kevin reports thinking "I hope this looks cool when it comes out."

One questioner asked Kevin about Ares' recent shift of his attention from Xena to Gabrielle. Kevin succinctly described it as "I can't get the girl I want... ooo, I'll have a crack at her mate."

Kevin took great offense (jokingly so) when someone suggested that Ares was afraid of Eli when he backed off from him in the episode Chakram. Kevin dismissed it as Eli doing "his Jesus thing", and then Ares suddenly remembering "Did I leave the stove on at home? I'll get right back to you," but that it most definitely was NOT fear.

Many people wanted to know about Ares' possible fatherhood of Xena's baby; whether he thought he might be the father, whether he wanted to be, whether he was disappointed when he found out he wasn't. Kevin said he knew it was a possibility when the storyline was introduced, and hoped that Ares was the father "only in that they would have to show the scene retrospectively." (Ha!)

Another question from Chakram and about the baby: one person suggested that Ares and Xena may have had a fling in the hot tub that would have been the origin of the baby. Kevin declared that Ares has a personal set of ethics, which includes "Never have sex with someone suffering from amnesia" and "Never have sex with someone who's been recently dead."

Kevin is getting a little put-out with how often Ares is getting beat up lately. "My ass is numb from all the kickings" he declared. He pointed out that at the beginning of the show, he got to win from time to time. "But then the beatings began." But in the upcoming episodes (minor spoilers here!), we see what Kevin called "the Indian summer of Ares", a lot of interesting things about the gods and their position on earth, and, to his delight, "I haven't been thrashed once... yet."

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