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MONSTER CHILD IN A PROMISED LAND (part 3)

"I consider Discord to be a comic character, but only in an unintentional way," Desmond says. "You have to laugh at all her near misses at villainy. She had a success rate of near zero as far as bad guy Olympics go, although what she lacked in accomplishments she more than made up for in scathing retorts and one-liners that totally appealed to my own sense of humor!"

"But given the chance," she adds, "I prefer to do the dramatic roles. That's what I like to watch anyway. If it's a choice between drama and comedy at the video store, I'll go with drama every time. But having said that, I love to laugh." There were certainly plenty of laughs on the set with Kevin Smith and Joel Tobeck. "There were no tricks played on me on the set," she reveals, "but there was always a lot of hilarity, especially if the scene happened to have Kevin and Joel in it. When those two get together they are side-splittingly funny because they manage to find comedy in even the most mundane and unlikely actions, situations or people!"

While Desmond will probably always be best remembered as Discord in the Xenaverse, the actress played another very memorable role in Xena's fifth season: the mermaid Sturgina in the comedy episode Married with Fishsticks. "That's one of the Xena episodes I got the biggest kick out of working on," Desmond recalls. "That episode was a kind of symbolic realization of those daydreams you have when you're just a kid. It was a classic girlie get together between Renee O'Connor, Alex Tydings and myself, with all of us playing mermaids. That character was so different from Discord. She was way, way out there on another tangent. I loved the extremities of that."

"Frolicking poolside for a couple of days while we shot the episode was good as well," Desmond admits. "There was one scene that Alex and I did that was completely underwater. We were wearing mermaid tails and we had divers hiding out of shot holding us in position as well as being ready to give us oxygen when we ran out of breath. It was a very cool experience."

One of Desmond's first acting jobs in her short but so far extremely successful career was in the successful New Zealand medical soap Shortland Street. "I played a rebellious 15-year-old schoolgirl with a few problems who, in the end, had a good and happy heart," Desmond reveals. "I've found that more often than not I tend to be cast in the bad or troubled psycho-girlie roles. Whether I'm typecast, who knows, but I find it much easier to play dark, messed up characters than straight normal characters. But let me reassure you that this is not a reflection of my own character!"

part 4