"I once bungee-jumped out of a helicopter," the actress coolly tells Stuff. "It was an 800-foot fall, and I wasn't that impressed. You're so high above the ground that you don't get the sense of imminent death like you do when you're jumping off, say, a bridge."
The 32-year-old actress attributes her nerves of steel to her New Zealand heritage. "We live at the edge of the world, so we live on the edge," she says. "Kiwis will always sacrifice money and security for adventure and challenge."
Lawless says she actually performs a lot of her own stunts on the action-packed Xena series — and has the cuts, bruises and torn ligaments to prove it. "Sometimes you've just got to give it a whirl," she tells the article's author. "Embrace death, darling."
Still, as tough as she is, Lawless doesn't miss her grueling years as a teenage gold miner in the Australian outback. "I had to saw miles of bloody rock in half," she recalls. "It was the most depressing thing, because in the middle of winter it's freezing. You get sick of being cut, wet and cold. We're not born to deal with that."
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