One of the weirdest things was first being introduced to Pilot. Someone took me into the shed and said, 'look at him, isn't he gorgeous?' and I didn't know what to think. I mean, I'd never seen anything like it before and it wasn't until he really came alive that I could see him as something living.

There was a whole person inside Pilot's shell, there was a person on each of his forearms, there'd be someone doing his eyes, his eyebrows, his mouth... That particular puppeteering, that set, was so difficult and arduous for the puppeteers; it was really hot, it was totally cramped. It would therefore be even more difficult to bring more than one actor in at a time, if that.

I was instantly drawn to the expressiveness of Pilot's eyes and that made it easy for me to do scenes with him. Sometimes you'll do scenes with actors and they're glazed over and the lights are on, but nobody's home. With Pilot that was never the case, and certainly not with the actors on Farscape. Just the experience of working with a creature that was real enough for me to emote with says a lot about the work that was done on him by the puppeteers and by the people who created the animatronics and painted him.

It's something that directors will often put on their showreels: there'll be scenes where I'm emoting, I'll be crying with Pilot, and it seems to be valuable for people to see that a director was able to direct an actor to a level of emotion with something that isn't human. I found it easy, actually.

In the final scene that I shot with Pilot in season four it looked like we were about to do a love scene, we'd got so close. One thing that we learnt very early on was the more physical contact you have with these objects, the less inanimate they are and the more lifelike they become. We would always aim to have as much physical contact with them as possible.