Kai is the last of the Brunnen-G. He is also dead.
MURDERED BY THE TYRANNICAL ruler of the Cluster, His Shadow, millennia ago. Kai has since existed as a member of the undead, killing people as an assassin of His Shadow. Eventually, Kai manages to recover his memory and fulfil his destiny of bringing His Shadow's rule to an end, but this left him with nowhere to go and no desire to do anything in particular, on the principle that he was still dead. Luckily, the crew of the accidentally-stolen LEXX were quite happy for Kai to join them. thus providing actor Michael McManus with several years work. One of the first things McManus is keen to point out is that Kai. like the rest of the LEXX team, is not a hero.
"People make him the hero because they've gotta do that, but they're making it up. He's not a hero. Every atom of his body is soaked in the blood of innocent people he slaughtered while he was a mindless assassin for the evil genius of the Light Universe!

And he still manages to screw up everything all kinds of ways, but he gets away with it; kind of like being white and upper-middle class, the s**t you get away with is just amazing in this world, and people don't kill you for reasons that are completely mysterious to me."

Moving swiftly along, it seems prudent to steer McManus towards a discussion of his character. Kai is dead, so he can't really have much personality. Does McManus get fed up with being overlooked in favour of the... well, living cast?

"1 think when it settles down and the series sort of forgets about Kai and gets into other things, that's fine. I mean, how could you buy it? The guy's been around for so long, so if he starts to develop character, inititative, it would be kind of bad pool. I've played a couple of passive characters in (Canada, McManus's homeland), and the young male character is often a passive character in Canadian literature, theatre and film. This is the most passive character I'll ever play! I don't want to play passive characters any more. But while we're doing this one. I think it's exactly right just not to dwell on it."

In the most recent series of LEXX, there have been several episodes where Kai acts out of character. McManus was happy to be able to stretch his acting muscles in sto¬ries such as Wake the Dead, in which the last of the Brunnen-G reverts to being a psychopathic killer.
"Wake the Dead was the second one Chris Bould directed, and we had to fight so, so much, both of us, knocking down all the people who were very nervous about that story, very nervous about Kai letting his hair down, about the extremity of it. Even the make-up girl was saying to the executive producer. 'You can't do this. The girls won't love Kai any more, because this show is terrible! He can't look ugly and he can't put his hair down.' You're going. 'What are you talking about? Rock'n'rollers for years have been dining out on exactly those f***ed up kind of things.'" McManus laughs.

"That show gets more romantic response than anything else I've ever done! People really like it and find it really really sexy. It was a pleasure to shoot, great to do and a lot of fun." McManus is also characteristically honest about a couple of other fan favourites, such as the musical episode Brigadoom. " It was put together in a whirlwind, and the result is a little disappointing, but it was a thrill. Taking those kind of chances is just great fun. Same thing for Wake the Dead and Twilight. It's fun to take those kinds of chances."

Fleshed Out Corpse

Of all the characters, Kai is ironically the most fleshed-out. We know little about Stan and Xev's backgrounds, but Kai's culture has been fundamental to several stories. Of the three main cast, Kai's 'look" is the most important, defining him where his lack of personality cannot. Although McManus admits that the mainly silk costume is comfortable, the tools of Kai's assassin trade are less easy to cope with, such as his arm brace, which carries a long rope and can be used as an effective offensive or defensive weapon. McManus describes its genesis.

"There have been a couple of incarnations of the bug. Originally there was just a little thing, like a margarine container; it was just supposed to really be a mark for long shots, and they were going to CGI in the whole brace. Then after they did that once in the first movie, it turned out to be quite expensive. They stopped CGI-ing the brace, and we used something that was just mocked up to kind of fill-in until they could do a CGI close-up. To me, it's always kind of worked, but it's the most ridiculous rig." McManus launches into a detailed explanation with actions and sound effects.

"There's a pole that goes through [the elbow] and when it shoots - we've got it down to one guy now, it occasionally was two right behind me - there's some guy right back here," he points a few feet behind him, "trying to stay out of camera, shooting this thing out of my arm. A few times when it's free flight, [we] yanked it out with a fishing line. My favourite time was in Nook, when I throw the bread up and split it. The guy doing it was up on a catwalk and he yanked it out and got nailed right in the middle of his chest." Surely it is more trouble than it's worth? McManus laughs, "I think it's exactly the right mixture of good and bad for that LEXX texture, but we are gonna try to make a more sophisti-cated one; a puppet effects company in Germany are gonna have a go."

Then of course there are problems in being dead. Several times Kai has lost a part of his anatomy, so while on the subject of props it seems worth asking how many dif¬ferent Kais there are. "There's pretty much only one spare costume," replies McManus after a moment's thought, "but it almost doesn't fit anymore because it's been chopped up and sewn back together. I think there may be four heads. One's sort of a 'squooshed' one they stuck eyes in, and the eyes are kinda cool, but the face itself has got that Michael Jackson look, a face that's been too handled by too many people. There's a closed-eye head, a couple of arms; I don't even know if they're mine!"

"It varies a little bit. There's one scene I like a lot. It's another good/bad moment, one of the motion control camera shots from the first movie. After the fight with Thodin on the gangway, when I get my head chopped off down to here," he indicates the area just above his mouth, "and under me's a board, with some proto-blood leaking out around the sides - I love that. But then there's a great computer-camera shot where I pick up my own head and put it back on. That was really carefully done - and we've found cheaper ways to do it since then - but that was a puppeteer on the show who just put on my costume, and when my head was on the ground, his hands sort of matched my hands. But then there's a horrific moment in the very first really nice opening fight against the Divine Shadow with the Stingers. It's a moment that I still have nightmares about when they needed an insert and I wasn't available. So they got Derek, he was a production assistant; he's short, he's got little pink unmade-up hands, and my costume is, like, over his knuckles. They used a woman in movie three [Eating Pattern], and seeing her, she's just hanging there like a sack of potatoes. It's just awful, because you think that's me!"

As time starts to run out and McManus is thinking about the early days of the series, it seems a good point to ask about the hauntingly beautiful Brunnen-G chant. "It came from the music guy. Marty [Simon] sang it," McManus explains. "I think they put a little bit of me singing in, that they got off the actual miked event when we did the scene, so they bleed me in a little bit."

Chanting as We Speak

However, McManus is quick to point out that this didn't go quite to plan either. "That song was one of the first things we got done music-wise and he says 'Brun-an', before the first time it was pronounced and 'Broonen' was decided upon, the more German pronunciation of that German word which means 'found'. It was put down as something to correct later, [but it didn't] get corrected. There's another slightly horrific moment at the end of the musical when Marty Simon's voice is coming out of my lip-sync singing that song and still mispronouncing 'Broon-en'. Those kind of things, they just make me hit the roof. I'm most neurotic as an actor when I'm watching myself on tv." Luckily for Michael McManus, neurotic is probably the best way to be when you're involved in making LEXX.

Paul Spragg