SAN DIEGO — The end of Spartacus: Blood and Sand left Lucy Lawless’ character in a bad place, but the star says Lucretia will bounce back with fury when the show returns next year with Spartacus: Vengeance.

“She’s gonna hack and claw her way to some kind of status,” Lawless says in the Wired.com video above. “And I get to play with Viva Bianca, who plays Ilythia, and she’s the bitch, that blonde Roman bitch who locked us in when the massacre happened. Oh, she’s got vengeance coming.”

The swords-and-sandals TV epic chronicling Spartacus‘ Roman revolt got a lot of attention when it debuted last year, thanks to episodes filled with blood, guts and sex. The violence and gore will no doubt continue next season, and fans can rest assured that the sex will continue unabated as well, according to Lawless.

“I thought after all my character has been through that the sex scenes would be over for me — sadly not,” Lawless says. “The people that I end up having to shtup are quite surprising.”

Also new for the next season is Liam McIntyre, who is taking over as Spartacus, the Thracian warrior who led the slave uprising. Spartacus was played in the first season by Andy Whitfield, who was forced to leave the show after being diagnosed with cancer.

“I got a big responsibility to do my own Spartacus and honor that first legacy,” McIntyre says in the video interview, conducted during Comic-Con International last month. Spartacus: Vengeance comes to Starz in January 2012.