Margaret Moth, who was shot in the face while covering the Bosnian war, was wild, heroic and sexually adventurous – the perfect subject, Lawless says, for her directorial debut

Margaret Moth and Lucy Lawless: the names alone, alliterative and faintly fantastical, suggest larger-than-life superheroes. That isn’t too far from the truth. Moth, born Margaret Wilson in Gisborne, New Zealand in 1951, transformed herself into the woman she wanted to be. She cast off the blond cherubic sweetness of her childhood, adopted an all-black look from the tips of her punky hairdo to her combat boots, named herself after the insect that she most feared, and went to court to fight for her legal right to be sterilised. (“I’m not a breeder,” she said.) She went on to become an intrepid news camerawoman who sought out ever more dangerous assignments, and didn’t run for cover when she got there. On the West Bank, she was shot in the foot by an Israeli soldier. In Sarajevo, a sniper’s bullet destroyed her lower jaw. Only in a war zone, a colleague once observed, did she truly know who she was.

Now Lawless, a fellow New Zealander best known for playing Xena: Warrior Princess in the 1990s fantasy action series of the same name, has made her directorial debut with Never Look Away, a documentary about Moth, who died in 2010. The 56-year-old actor turned director could see the headlines before she had shot a frame of footage. “‘Warrior Princess on TV meets Warrior Princess in real life!’” she says, leaning across the table in a busy London cafe to make herself heard over the din. “Looks good in print, right? Even down to the ‘MM’ and ‘LL’ of it.”