If you've ever wondered how you could be typecast as dead, here's your chance to find out as we enter the murky world of LEXX with Michael McManus, alias heroic stiff Kai.

AMERE couple of years ago, a new Science Fiction series made its debut, but although this one featured Space, spaceships and alien races, it was different. More organic, more visceral, unafraid to be something more than a little out of the ordinary, the first movie to use the name LEXX was unlike anything that had appeared before on TV. The characters are led by human desires rather than heroism, and the series features some of the weirdest planets ever. The trend has continued throughout its three sequels, and the first complete season of 20 episodes, and Canadian actor Michael McManus has been there from the beginning. So what originally brought him to the role of Kai, last of the Brunnen-G and pinup for dead people?

"I worked first with Paul Donovan in 1987 on a docu-drama called The Squamish Five and we got on very well," states McManus, "and I still like that piece of television. It's not perfect by any means, but it's one thing that Canadian media seems to have figured out quite well, the docu-drama. We became friends, worked one other time together, and then for the two years before the money came in for LEXX and the casting started, I was hearing about it and was friends with one of the writers, Jeffrey Hirschfield, who also plays the voice of 790. "So I was in the whole discussion group, and when Paul got the money, it went to production very quickly, so he had the casting sessions and he called me in. I thought it was just a courtesy call because I'd heard so much about it, but he claims he wrote the part with me in mind.

"I think he sort of sabotaged the other actor's chances, and really biased the whole thing," laughs the actor, "because when I went in I didn't go in 'off book', I just went in with an idea about the scene and read about a page. He sent me away to go memorize the lines, and I started to realize he was being serious. So I went away, memorized the lines, came back, and we put together a very careful audition, then 1 got a screen test and that was it."

McManus is certainly happy being part of the LEXX crew, and is suitably blase about the trials of life in a TV series. "I've enjoyed it, because LEXX is whacked and the actors coming in are all really good. It's a little bit daunting to be in a series, because somehow it really threatens to just eclipse and obliterate any other work I've done, but that's life. I'm in my mid-305, and it's a better paycheque than I've ever gotten." You certainly can't argue with that. Of course, short of making your way through the business playing third corpse from the left and working up to the animated dead, there's no way of preparing for life as Kai. McManus's outlook on the thought of typecasting was typically surprising, however.

"No, no, that is my type! My agent right now, she thinks I could be a romantic lead or something. But she's wrong. In elementary school, I played the Russian guy. I'd left choir school, so I was a singer. For a kid, I was pretty well-trained halfway through grade seven.

"I went to a school and was hauled in by the choirmaster, who was doing Fiddler on the Roof, and she tried me out and said 'You've gotta come play this part' and the part was the Russian character, the sort of alienated character. I can't remember all the details, but he's a soldier and he's different from everybody else in the world of Fiddler on the Roof. Every introduction I've had to any medium or a new town or whatever, it's always alienated characters, and this is the most alienated character that I've ever gotten, so it's absolutely right within my type."

Alienated he may be, but Kai is still usually the person who rescues the rest of the crew from danger. McManus is quick to deny that this doesn't necessarily make him a hero, however. "The confusion around Wake the Dead was just that: this guy's the hero, so he can't do that. My argument was he's a kind he is a machine, is something like in Wake the Dead, where kids wake him up wrong, they mess with his system and he turns into a really screwed-up psycho-killer thing."

Then there's the romantic angle. From day one, Xev (or then Zev) was in love with Kai, but apparently this doesn't make the former assassin a romantic character either.

"The extent to which he's a romantic character in the show, that's all created by Xev. So the change of Xevs is really interesting, but it changes the Kai character as much as the Xev character. People can put romance onto the character all they want.

"When we did the musical and the ideas for what the Brunnen-G culture was were being generated, I was lobbying to add the fact — which is sort of there by implication - that at the time of the destruction of the Brunnen planet, he's a real ideological type. He could have, to me, been anything. He could have been a really messed up human on a persona! level, but with big ideals. But the romantic part, I think other people do that. I don't really see him that way."

Moving on from the characterization, Kai is clearly the most awkward person to deal with. Stan and Xev just need a simple costume, but McManus requires various tubes and suchlike to be added. Apparently, the outfit isn't as uncomfortable as it looks. "The costume's fine. It's a lot like this amazing group of motorbike couriers. They're dressed in the same kind of way, and that's an awfully comfortable way to dress. The boots are handmade leather boots made for my foot; they're fantastic boots.

The underpants and the pants are made out of raw silk, very cosy, and the outer stuff which looks heavy is just a hempy kind of material tied together like those carpets that they make in Nova Scotia, with some holes cut in it. Then the material part of the suit underneath is silk."

Although many of the effects in LEXX are computer-generated, McManus has the lion's share of real life props to deal with. Luckily, that's all part of the fun for him.

"I love that stuff. One of my favourite things is the 'Dr Kai' moments, when he does operations or whatever; shoving a heart into that girl in 791 is so great.

"There's all these tools that are bought, Russian surgical tools that are sold off in Berlin or something, these old things that you get at flea markets and they're really cool because they're all like clamps and all this stuff. I really get into it. I encourage that sort of thing. If there's any prop, the props guys are terrified of me because I like getting in there with the props and breaking props and using them for all they're worth."

Many series allow their stars input into the direction of their characters. According to McManus, although the door is open, he's less keen to step through than others in his profession can be. "At the beginning of the 20, [Jeffrey Hirschfield and Lex Gigeroff] got me out for a drink, saying 'This character's a real problem.' I was going, The problem is easy: you guys made a premise, you set up a character, live with it, it's simple!' That pressured them to write these more extreme episodes [such as Wake the Dead and Twilight, in which radiation makes Kai go slightly crazy]. When something's been written and it's lively and interesting, like Wake the Dead, then what happens is people start attacking it, including actors, to try and modify it or say, 'I can't do that, he's the hero', all this junk which is just bulls**t. "So when you get a script that reaches a certain stage, and it's exciting, then if I think it's doable, whether it's extreme or not, then that's the point where 1 start to be very proactive in terms of preserving it and preventing a rewrite that softens things, or that just starts to typify things that should resist being typified. That's my aim; that's how I get my input in as an actor, by being sort of an anti-dramaturgist." There'll be plenty more chances for McManus to have his say, as LEXX was recently picked up for a second year. Can McManus provide any information about what to expect?

"Yeah, we start July 19th, shooting 13 episodes. The scripts are shakier than the concept, which I think by now is pretty rock solid. Basically, I think the part I can tell you is that they've ended up in the Dark Universe, and the ship doesn't work and they're far, far away from any planet or anything, so they put themselves in freezing and they estimate it'll be thousands of years before they drift to the nearest planet. They drift to this binary system of planets, and the whole 13 hours is what happens on those two planets; the idea sort of being one 13-hour episode, with the idea probably of making it more inccomprehensible than it already is!" Well, that's a relief. For a second, there was concern that LEXX might suddenly become normal.

Paul Spragg