The man who played the strongest man on television was secretly dying while the world watched him throw monsters through walls. Kevin Sorbo, the star of the 1995 syndicated phenomenon Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, suffered three undetected strokes at the height of his fame, a medical catastrophe that remained hidden from the public for nearly 15 years. The revelation is just one of twenty bizarre, shocking, and deeply human facts that have emerged from the behind-the-scenes chaos of a show that defined 1990s pop culture.
What follows is the untold story of a television empire built on crisis, coincidence, and the sheer will of a cast and crew who had no idea they were making history.
In the summer of 1997, Sorbo noticed a strange tingling in his left arm. His fingers turned cold. His vision blurred.
At 38 years old, he was the picture of health, training daily and performing his own stunts. Multiple doctors dismissed his symptoms during a press tour for the film Kull the Conqueror. Sorbo believed them.
He was Hercules. Then, while lifting weights, a searing pain shot down his left side. Driving home from a chiropractor, his vision collapsed so badly he could barely see the road.
An angiogram revealed an aneurysm in his left shoulder that had been sending blood clots through his system for months. After surgery, doctors delivered the news that would change everything. Sorbo had already suffered three strokes without realizing it.
He kept the diagnosis secret for almost 15 years, later admitting in a Fox News interview that ego and fear kept him silent. In his memoir, True Strength, he described going from a carefree athlete to someone who needed to grip chairs and counters just to make a five-yard trip to the bathroom. Nobody watching at home knew the man playing Hercules could barely walk across his own trailer.
The production team now faced an impossible problem. Their lead actor could barely stand, but the show still had to deliver new episodes every week. Screen time was cut.
Stunt doubles took over. In some episodes, Sorbo appeared for only a few minutes. Then writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci came up with something nobody expected.
They created an episode called Yes, Virginia, There Is a Hercules, set in the modern day, where the cast played fictionalized versions of the show’s writers and producers. Bruce Campbell played producer Rob Tapert. Michael Hurst played writer Paul Robert Coyle.
Kevin Smith played writer Jerry Patrick Brown. The story followed the staff panicking after Sorbo vanished during an earthquake in Los Angeles. The twist revealed the fictional Kevin Sorbo was actually Hercules living as a mortal in the 20th century while playing himself in his own television show.
Ares appeared and mocked his brother for pretending to be a mortal named Kevin Sorbo. Think about that too hard and it creates a paradox that will melt your brain. The entire episode was born from a medical crisis, yet it became one of the most creative episodes of 1990s television.
The man who played Ares in that episode, the one who stole every single scene he walked into, had a real-life story far more devastating than anything his character ever experienced on camera. Kevin Smith, the New Zealand-born actor who made the God of War feel genuinely terrifying and seductive at the same time, had absolutely no plans to ever set foot on a stage. His entire dream growing up was to play professional rugby.
He lived and breathed the sport through his teenage years and into adulthood. Acting was never even on his radar. Then a concussion during a rugby match sidelined him.
While he was stuck at home recovering, his wife Suzanne spotted a casting notice for a musical about Elvis Presley called Are You Lonesome Tonight. She pushed him to try out. He went and he got the part.
That single moment redirected his entire life. Smith first appeared on Hercules not as Ares, but as Iphicles, Hercules fully mortal half-brother. The producers saw something electric in his screen presence and later brought him back as Ares, which became the role that defined his career.
From 1998 to 1999, Smith was simultaneously playing the God of War across three different television series at the same time. He appeared as Ares on Hercules, Xena, and Young Hercules concurrently, a scheduling feat that is almost unheard of in the television industry. Fans at conventions across the United States treated him like a rock star, and Hollywood was finally starting to pay attention.
Smith was on the verge of crossing into major feature films when a catastrophic accident in China ended everything in the worst way possible.
In February of 2002, Kevin Smith had just finished filming the martial arts sequel Warriors of Virtue 2 in Beijing. He was excited because it gave him the chance to train with a stuntman from the acclaimed film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. On February 6th, the day after filming wrapped, Smith fell from a lighting tower on set.
Some reports place the fall at six stories. His injuries were catastrophic. He was placed on life support with severe head trauma.
His wife Suzanne and his parents, Jeff and Yvonne, flew to Beijing and were by his side when he passed away 10 days later on February 15th at just 38 years old. He left behind three sons, Oscar, 11, Tyrone, nine, and Willard, only three. The part that still haunts fans is what was supposed to happen next.
In March that same year, Smith was scheduled to fly to Hawaii to begin filming the action thriller Tears of the Sun alongside Bruce Willis. It would have been his first major Hollywood role and the breakout moment everyone believed was coming. His memorial service was held at Auckland Aotea Centre where castmates remembered a man who brought warmth, chaos, and laughter wherever he went.
Kevin Smith was never really a villain. He simply played one better than almost anyone else ever had.
The woman whose spin-off had already made her more famous than Hercules himself had an origin story on the show that was built entirely on rejection, illness, and sheer desperation. Xena was never supposed to become a franchise. The character was written as a disposable three-episode villain in season one of Hercules and was meant to die in her final appearance, redeeming herself by sacrificing her life after her own soldiers turned against her.
The first actress cast as Xena was Vanessa Angel, star of the Weird Science television series. Angel fell ill and could not fly to New Zealand for filming. Writer John Schulian later revealed the team spent the entire New Year weekend searching for a replacement.
Producer Robert Tapert then offered the role to Kim Delaney, who accepted immediately. But her manager called back 30 minutes later and withdrew her. Four more actresses were offered the role and everyone turned it down.
Meanwhile, production was running out of time. Executives also resisted casting Lucy Lawless because she had just appeared in the previous Hercules episode as a different character named Lila, fearing audiences would be confused. Lawless later joked that the producers showed her a list of five actresses and they all said no.
So she thanked every one of them. She landed one of the most iconic female action roles of the 1990s simply because she was the last person left. That is how close the world came to never having Xena at all.
The spin-off that nobody planned for ended up becoming so successful that it reportedly created real friction with the man who was supposed to be the star of the entire franchise. When Xena: Warrior Princess premiered in the fall of 1995 alongside Hercules season two, it was expected to ride in its parent show shadow. That lasted about six weeks.
Xena exploded in the ratings and blew past Hercules in viewership and cultural impact, eventually airing in more than 108 countries. TV Guide ranked it among its top cult shows ever. Reports began circulating that Kevin Sorbo was not handling the situation well.
Multiple sources suggested he had grown frustrated watching the spin-off overshadow his show. Lawless addressed the speculation in a 1997 interview saying there was no point in competing and describing the casts as one big happy family. Whether that was true behind closed doors is another matter.
In the decades since both shows ended, Lawless and Sorbo relationship deteriorated publicly, erupting into political clashes on social media that made it clear the harmony she described had not survived.
While the leads were dealing with all of that tension off-screen, one actor on the show was quietly pulling off something absurd that the producers actually tried to cover up with fake names. Michael Hurst, the British-born New Zealand actor who played Iolaus, was one of the most versatile performers in the franchise. Across Hercules, Xena, and Young Hercules, Hurst portrayed 13 different characters in 86 episodes.
Besides Iolaus, he played the underworld ferryman Charon beneath heavy prosthetic makeup, the alternate universe Iolaus II, Iolaus half-cousin Orestes, the demon Dahak, and several others. His most unusual creation was the Widow Twankey, a flamboyant British pantomime dame the producers discovered after watching Hurst perform in a local Auckland production of Pinocchio. They loved the performance and insisted he bring the character to the show.
Because Hurst was born in Lancashire, England, he delivered the thick Northern English accent with complete authenticity, something British audiences noticed immediately. When those episodes aired, Hurst was not credited under his real name for the Widow Twankey scenes. Instead, the credits listed him as Edith Sidebottom.
In the chaotic episode Greece is Burning, he even received two fake credits in the same episode. Edith Sidebottom for the Widow Twankey and Billy Wagstaff for a beggar he also played. The man became his own supporting cast, proving few actors matched his range or creativity.
While Hurst was juggling 13 different roles in New Zealand, a teenager from Canada was about to show up on set wearing foam padding to make his arms look bigger. And that teenager would become one of the most famous actors alive. When the prequel Young Hercules was greenlit for Fox Kids in 1998, the producers needed a new actor to play the teenage demigod.
The original Young Hercules, Ian Bohen, declined because he did not want to relocate to New Zealand for a full series. Instead, an unknown 17-year-old Canadian named Ryan Gosling won the role. His costume and arm makeup were designed to make him appear bigger and more muscular.
Since Gosling did not exactly look like a demigod at 17, he moved to Auckland and filmed 50 episodes before the series was canceled after one season. In the years since, Gosling has rarely spoken about the experience and many people involved with the production believe he does not look back on it with much affection. The show quietly disappeared and Gosling returned to North America where he soon landed The Notebook and entered a completely different level of fame.
Think about that for a second. One of the most acclaimed actors of his generation, the star of La La Land, Blade Runner 2049, and Barbie spent his teenage years wearing fake muscle padding and swinging prop swords at rubber monsters in a children television series about Greek mythology filmed thousands of miles from home.
Gosling was not even close to the only future star hiding in the Hercules cast. The list of names that passed through that show is genuinely staggering. The Hercules and Xena universe doubled as an informal training camp for New Zealand actors who would later become internationally famous.
Karl Urban played Cupid on Hercules and Julius Caesar on Xena before landing the role of Eomer in Lord of the Rings, Dr. Bones McCoy in the Star Trek reboot, and Billy Butcher in The Boys. Rose McIver, who now leads the CBS hit Ghosts, appeared on Hercules as a child after making her film debut at age three in Jane Campion The Piano.
Her brother, Paul McIver, played Hercules son Iolaus in the television movies. Bruce Campbell played the recurring thief Autolycus across nearly 20 episodes and directed behind the camera. Gina Torres, who later became Jessica Pearson in Suits, played the warrior queen Nebula.
The credits list reads like a who who of people who went on to shape modern pop culture.
The man pulling the strings behind all of it had an even bigger ambition waiting in the wings. The skills he sharpened on Hercules gave him the tools to change superhero cinema forever. The executive producer behind the entire franchise was Sam Raimi, the cult filmmaking legend behind the Evil Dead trilogy.
Raimi production company Renaissance Pictures, co-founded with Robert Tapert and Bruce Campbell, produced every single episode of Hercules, Xena, and Young Hercules. Running three interconnected action fantasy series simultaneously in New Zealand on a syndicated television budget gave Raimi an education in visual effects production that almost no other filmmaker on Earth had at that time. When Sony hired him to direct Spider-Man in 2002, Raimi brought the efficiency and visual storytelling instincts he had spent years perfecting in Auckland.
Bruce Campbell appeared in cameos in all three Spider-Man films, a tradition rooted in their shared Hercules work. Robert Tapert, who produced alongside Raimi the entire time, married Lucy Lawless in 1998 while both shows were still in production. The franchise was essentially a family business disguised as a television empire.
Raimi was not the only person on the Hercules set whose professional life and personal life collided in ways nobody expected. The love story that played out between Hercules and his on-screen love interest was happening in real life at the worst possible time. Kevin Sorbo met actress Sam Jenkins on the Hercules set during the season three episode Prince Hercules in 1996.
Their very first scene together required a kiss. Sorbo later admitted that having a scripted kissing scene with someone he found immediately attractive made asking her out significantly easier. Jenkins had studied biomedical engineering at Duke University before modeling with the Elite agency in Paris.
She brought a sharpness to their conversations that Sorbo was not expecting. She described their connection as clever banter that made them both laugh. Sorbo proposed six months later.
They married on January 5th, 1998. What makes this different from every Hollywood set romance is the timing. During their courtship, Sorbo was secretly enduring the aftermath of three strokes that left him struggling to walk.
Jenkins did not run. She shelved her own career to help the man she loved learn how to function again. She later contributed chapters to his memoir True Strength, saying publicly that he truly is her hero.
The show itself was not interested in telling a traditional Greek mythology story. The creative team had a very specific and very American blueprint for who Hercules was supposed to be. The creators made a conscious decision that their Hercules would feel nothing like the marble statue most people associated with the character.
Series creator Christian Williams studied every existing portrayal in myth and cinema, including the 1958 Steve Reeves classic, and threw it all out. Williams told the writing staff that Hercules needed a completely American persona. His model was Joe Montana, the legendary San Francisco quarterback.
Sam Raimi said in a 1995 interview that they did not want gods staring down from Mount Olympus, and chose to make Hercules an American regular guy who was not necessarily a muscle head. That decision shaped everything. Apollo rode a golden snowboard and talked like a Californian teenager.
The dialogue was packed with modern slang. The producers avoided white togas entirely. Everything was designed to feel like a 1990s buddy comedy that happened to exist in a world of gods and monsters.
That refusal to play things straight also led the show to cross a line that most series would never dare touch. It resulted in an existential paradox that still does not have a satisfying answer. Within the show own mythology, an episode reveals that Hercules survived into the late 20th century by ascending to godhood and chose to live among mortals using the alias Kevin Sorbo.
He then worked on his own television show to make sure it accurately reflected the era he lived through. The character Hercules is playing himself in a dramatization of his own life performed by an actor who is also literally himself. A second meta episode pushed even further with a killing mystery unfolding at a corporate retreat while Kevin Sorbo secretly uses divine strength to protect the crew.
When someone points out that if Ares is real, then Hercules must be real, too. Every person in the room slowly turns to stare at Kevin. He laughs it off, says he is just an actor, then looks directly into the camera and raises his eyebrows.
No show in the 1990s was doing this, and Hercules pulled it off as a comedy bit born from the crisis of their lead actor hidden strokes.
The fight sequences that filled every episode looked like ancient warfare on screen, but the martial arts system powering every single punch and kick came from a tradition that most people would never associate with Greek mythology. Every fight scene in the entire series was choreographed using a specific and rare Chinese martial arts system called White Lotus Kung Fu. The show martial arts instructor was Douglas L.
Wong, a legendary practitioner and teacher of the style who spent a full six weeks before filming began giving Kevin Sorbo an intense personal crash course. The choice was deliberate and completely unconventional. Rather than using the slow, heavy sword and shield fighting you would expect from a show set in ancient Greece, the producers wanted fast, acrobatic, visually explosive combat that would pop on a television screen.
White Lotus Kung Fu emphasized fluid movement, rapid strikes, and the kind of aerial wirework that Western audiences had only ever seen in Hong Kong action films. Hercules was one of the very first Western television productions to use extensive wire fu action sequences years before The Matrix made wirework mainstream. Sorbo performed many of his own stunts and fight sequences through the first three seasons, which makes the fact that he suffered three undetected strokes during that same physical workload even more alarming in hindsight.
The show was also quietly pioneering something else that nobody on television was doing at that scale. It involved the monsters that Hercules fought every week. Before Buffy demons or Stargate aliens became routine, Hercules was pushing the boundaries of computer-generated creatures on weekly television in ways nobody else was attempting.
The show was among the first to use fully CGI monsters extensively, including the multi-headed hydra and the towering Echidna, creatures impossible to create with puppets or prosthetics. In the mid-1990s, CGI was still a feature film luxury. The New Zealand effects team developed techniques on a fraction of what major studios spent for similar results.
The creatures looked rough by modern standards, but in 1995, nobody watching syndicated television had ever seen anything like them. That willingness to experiment on a shoestring budget also quietly built the visual effects infrastructure New Zealand would later use for far bigger projects.
The New Zealand film industry that Hercules helped build did not just train camera crews and stunt performers. The scale of what this show accidentally created is something most fans have never fully understood. Before Peter Jackson ever scouted a location for The Lord of the Rings in 1998, Hercules and Xena had already spent years training an entire generation of New Zealand film professionals.
Production manager Pip Gillings, who later worked on Mission Impossible Fallout, started her career on the Hercules set. She said the longevity of those shows was a great training ground for a lot of people. Hercules helped launch Auckland film companies still operating today, including Main Reactor, which later built weapons for Disney live-action Mulan.
When Jackson arrived to construct Middle-earth, the camera operators, stunt coordinators, and effects technicians who powered his trilogy were largely Hercules and Xena veterans. New Zealand film industry now generates roughly two billion dollars in annual GDP, and insiders trace that boom directly to the swords and sandals era Hercules pioneered.
The producers did not just let the actors fight in ancient Greece, either. The creative freedom they gave the cast changed the personality of the entire show in ways that scripted television almost never allows. The producers operated under a philosophy that was genuinely unusual for 1990s syndicated television.
During script readings, writers were completely open to suggestions from the actors. Beyond accepting notes, they actively encouraged ad-libbing dialogue and physical gags during filming. This is why so many episodes carry a loose improvisational energy that feels nothing like the rigidly scripted fantasy shows of that era.
Michael Hurst used this freedom to push entire episodes into surreal territory. His episode And Fancy Free, which he also directed, was an homage to the Australian film Strictly Ballroom and replaced fight sequences with competitive ballroom dancing. Hurst said the dancing took three full days to film, longer than any fight scene in the show history.
The producers never reined it in. They understood the show personality came from that looseness and that unpredictability is why the show still holds up for people who grew up watching it.
The location where all of this creative chaos took place was almost not New Zealand at all. The country that nearly hosted ancient Greece would have produced a completely different show. Producer Eric Gruendemann spent months searching for the right place to film and New Zealand was not even on his list.
He needed a Southern Hemisphere location for longer summer daylight hours and evaluated every North American hub first, but Florida, North Carolina, Toronto, and the Pacific Northwest all failed to deliver the fantasy landscapes the show demanded. South Africa made the short list. Australia was close to being selected.
Then Gruendemann ran into an old colleague named Courtney Conte, who was already shooting in New Zealand and told him to forget Australia. Within two or three hours of Auckland, Gruendemann found dozens of completely different visual environments, from dense jungle to volcanic terrain, all at a fraction of the cost anywhere else. That single chance encounter changed the trajectory of Hercules and the future of an entire country film industry.
The casting process was just as chaotic as the location hunt. The man who almost played Zeus before Anthony Quinn would have brought an entirely different energy to the throne of Mount Olympus. Before Anthony Quinn ever stepped into the role, the producers went straight to Charlton Heston, the man who parted the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments and drove the chariot in Ben-Hur.
Heston was their first choice for the king of the gods. He passed without hesitation. The producers pivoted to Anthony Quinn, who had played Zorba the Greek and won two Academy Awards, and Quinn said yes.
What makes this rejection fascinating is that Quinn brought something Heston never would have. Quinn Zeus felt human and flawed and surprisingly tender in his scenes with Sorbo. The father-son tension between them did not feel rehearsed.
It felt lived in. Heston would have brought spectacle, but Quinn brought vulnerability, and that became one of the emotional anchors of the series.
The biggest rejection in the show history was not Heston walking away from Zeus, though. The actor who turned down the lead role would have created a version of Hercules that the world would barely recognize. The entire Hercules franchise was never meant to become a weekly television series.
Universal Studios and Sam Raimi originally created it as a rotating series of standalone TV movies for the syndicated Action Pack lineup in 1993. The first actor offered the title role was Dolph Lundgren, the Swedish action star famous for playing Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. Lundgren turned it down.
That decision became one of the franchise biggest turning points because his version of Hercules would have been a completely different character. The producers did not want a towering bodybuilder. They wanted someone audiences could relate to, someone who felt approachable.
When Kevin Sorbo auditioned, he was not the biggest man in the room. But producer Dan Filey saw something more important than size. He later described Sorbo as a genuinely likable everyday guy.
That quality changed everything. If Lundgren had accepted the role, there might have been no everyman Hercules, no Xena spin-off, no Young Hercules starring Ryan Gosling, and no launchpad for future stars like Karl Urban and Rose McIver. The franchise may never have helped build New Zealand television and film industry the way it did.
In many ways, the story of Hercules changed because one Swedish action star picked up the phone in 1993 and simply said no thanks.
