Lucy Lawless sat down for an interview with Observer recently, where she spilled the beans about her character on the upcoming STARZ series Ash Vs. Evil Dead, and she says the writers went back and forth so much on the role that they really didn’t have a handle on it until several episodes in.

“They kind of knew where they were going with the character, but they wanted to take some time to set up the world. You have to build the world before you can destroy it. Plus, I came on a bit late, and they still hadn’t decided what the role was. First it was Ruby Knowby, then she wasn’t, then she was, then she wasn’t again. By episode NINE, they decided ‘oh, yeah she totally is.’ That’s why when people asked who Ruby was we had to be like ‘oh, she’s a mysterious character’ because really we were like ‘We don’t know! We have no f**king clue!” Lawless said.

Lucy Lawless is perhaps best known in the U.S. as Xena, the Warrior Princess; however, she says she was careful not to put any of that character into her latest role, even though it was physically demanding like her old series.

“I don’t want bloody Xena in there. The physicality is quite different. I had to be careful to not make those kind of Xena sounds, which are quite natural to me when I’m fighting something. I don’t want to be Xena-esque, at all. You don’t smoosh those things together,” Lucy said.

The series–which will premiere on STARZ on Halloween–has drawn quite a bit of interest from fans of the original movies, which all star Bruce Campbell. There was even some question about whether there would be a cross-over at some point which featured Bruce’s character (Ash) and the one played by Jane Levy in the 2013 remake of the film. However, director Sam Raimi says it just hasn’t been possible.

“That’s something that I said I wanted to see. And I talked to Fede Alvarez, the director of the Evil Dead remake, and even said it at Comic-Con. But the reality is, once you’ve got these showrunners and writers working on this juggernaut, trying to figure out where the season’s going to go, it’s very hard to simultaneously write a combo movie that would fit in with where the series is going to end up at that particular point, and it really would have to coalesce with what the writers are doing in the writers’ room. So even though I said it, realistically, I don’t know how we’d be able to pull it off at this particular moment.”