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Claudia Black - The actress behind Farscape's leading lady - Aeryn Sun

Assuming Aeryn
  When you first got the part, what were your reactions? (Question from Matt Horn)

I first got the news about being cast on Farscape when I was up on the Gold Coast filming Pitch Black. It was an interesting history for me in particular because the show had come in the form of a pilot script to some of the theatrical agencies through a casting agent, and we knew it was a Jim Henson production. Some of the characters sounded extraordinary in terms of what they were aiming to do with the make-up and costumes and the special effects.

The role of Aeryn was being cast out of England or America - because it was a co-production there was a certain quota that they had to fill in terms of casting people from different territories, and the casting agency had said to me that they thought I'd be great for the role of Aeryn but unfortunately it was being cast elsewhere. They asked me nevertheless because they just had a feeling: would I, just in case, put down an audition tape for them? And then I thought nothing more of it.

There was instant - technically instant - chemistry because we just fell into a very easy rhythm with one another. That was the major point for me: being able to go back to the set and when people asked how the audition had gone, I said 'well, I can definitely work with this guy,'. It never really changed - it just got better from there.

There was an overlap between finishing Pitch Black and starting Farscape and there were some complications. The producers had to liase and I almost didn't get the job on Farscape - I'd completely forgotten about that actually!

Brian said to me afterwards, 'you know, we thought very hard and it almost didn't happen.' I didn't realise how serious it had got. At one point I actually had to ring David Camper - he'd left me his number - and say 'I've heard that this may not happen and I'm about to get the news that you've had to pass and go to someone else,' and he said, 'No, no, no, no you'll get it. We're making it happen, so just sit tight and we'll make it work,'.

I was very lucky though, more often than not in those circumstances when people are paying a lot of money to wait, they won't.

A normal day on the set of Farscape... If there is such a thing on Farscape! Whoever was a 'human face' on the show would be most likely to be on set first, for the first and last scenes of the day because they had to observe a turnaround for everyone. The actors who were in heavy make-up like Gigi Edgely, Virginia Hay, and Anthony Simcoe would still have to come in very early but they wouldn't be on set until much later. So [I was] getting up as late as possible, but still had to be on time for my pick-up.

The first season we starting filming at Fox Studios which was a total luxury because most people working on the show lived within 5 minutes of it, walking or driving. It was very central and they were fantastic purpose built studios. Then we moved out to these sheds in Homebush: no air conditioning, roofs that creaked, when it rained there was unbelievable noise, when the sun was out there was unbelievable noise from the creaking, there were planes overhead... It was an incredible environment to work in, which then meant re-voicing a lot of the work - about 98% by the end of the first full season.

So normally Ben and I would come in, and shoot for how ever many hours until lunch. It was all about lunch for me! I would just count the hours - it was like being back at school - and have an enormous lunch to re-fuel. Unless we were doing stunt scenes, because if we were doing a fight sequence at the end of the day I'd try not to eat too much because you get quite ill. Lunchtime, if we were lucky, we had to ourselves and, if we had to, we would do interviews.

Most days, by about season two, if I wasn't horizontal for about 5 minutes during the lunch I just did not think I would make it through. I don't know how Ben did it: he had more resilience and more staying power than anyone. Part-way through I actually turned to him and said, 'I've realised what you do now,' and he said 'What?'. I said 'You mentally prepare to do this show for 50 years, so that if we only do it for five you've got plenty of energy left in reserve.' He said, 'Yeah that's basically how I operate'. So, a normal day for most of us was to be tired, barely be coping, and for Ben [it was basically] smooth sailing.

I always read articles about pranks happening on sets where Mel Gibson is shooting something and that it's part of the Aussie larrikin sensibility. We didn't have many pranks per se, it was mostly a lot of mucking about.

When you're working with a lot of technical elements that you're trying to integrate, especially with the puppets, a lot of things would happen because it took so many people to just make one puppet creature, one Jim Henson creature, come alive. The puppeteers are so funny, so a lot of the time the comedy would come from John Eccleston who puppeteered Rygel in the first season. The cameras would stop rolling but he wouldn't - he'd keep going.

There's a lot of bloopers that I don't think the world will ever see because they're mostly of Anthony Simcoe and they're obscene. For the rest of us, I don't know. It was definitely a fun environment to work in and people were always mucking around until the last second - until action was called and we'd all get very serious and slide into our characters immediately... Or one would hope we would!

They were always bordering on the serious, a lot of the things that would happen on set, because we were dealing with pyrotechnics or props that were potentially dangerous or actors in really heavy hot suits. But I don't think any of us set out specifically to create pranks to play on other people.

One of the strangest things I experienced on one of my first days on Farscape was being led by the hand into the creature shop to meet Pilot and Rygel. I can't remember if his skin was on. The skin is the latex exterior that gets placed over him and changed depending on what we inflict upon them - the artists re-paint the exterior. By season two or three they were getting so frequently slimed, or dealing with food, that they were being changed with regularity.

The work behind making those puppets come to life astounded me from pre-production through to being on set. On set it was a work-in-progress. The Jim Henson company spend a lot of money on R&D as they're going; they're constantly trying to refine the technology. The animatronics in Rygel cost millions of dollars, I think, over several years of working on other projects.

To finally create Rygel as a character, 4 to 5 people on the floor would help bring in John Eccleston. His arm would be in the puppet, inside Rygel, and he would articulate the body and head. There'd be people physically moving him in, and they would have these special glasses that had cameras inside them. They could see on the monitor what the directors were seeing so they could position the puppet into the right place. We would seldom do shots where Rygel was flying in where you could see below the sled, as that's a very expensive shot to do and time consuming for the computer generators - for the CGI group.

Then there would be someone separately doing Rygel's eyes - his mouth was animatronics, and his ears. The puppeteer would do his voice on set only to be re-voiced by Jonathan Hardy afterwards, so there was a weird adjustment period getting used to the fact that there was a different character on set than there was after it had been revoiced. Rygel was quite ebullient on set, and cheeky, and then by the time Jonathan Hardy's very gruff voice came in he was a lot older and wiser, so that took a while to adjust to.

Then there were also the green screen elements, that component: screaming at a monster that isn't really there. Sometimes there wasn't much information the directors could give us at any given time. What that does for an actor - the lesson I really learned - was to distil everything and to simplify it down so that the responses I'm giving were generic enough that they could be applied to whatever gets placed in afterwards. But [I was] also having to conjure something that is real from the inside, so that you're not hamming it too much.

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.

The difficult episodes to film were the ones where we hadn't received the script before we started shooting.When you're a lead actor, or part of a core cast, you have a huge responsibility to carry the story, to work out what colour you bring to that canvas and to deliver that wholeheartedly. When you don't know what direction that's going in, or where it leads, you can't really fulfil your responsibilities. Sadly, creatively you have to tone down your choices because you have to make them more generic, so they can be slotted in to whatever is filled in around those scenes.

Meltdown was a particularly difficult episode to shoot because we had not received the script and the director was in the near-to-impossible position where he had to make something out of nothing. We had a basic idea of what was going to happen in the story but there are always so many indications from the writer as to how you tell the story. I mean, what's the story? There are only thirteen original stories told in a million different ways? One of the great things about Farscape was bringing a very irreverent tone to an otherwise common story, or putting a unique twist on the tale and we weren't in a position to do that as performers if we didn't have the story in front of us. It's hard to do a painting without the canvas.

Contrasting that there were episodes like Ben Browder's one [John Quixote] where I played the crazy blonde-haired princess. The wig was very heavy and I started to get a bit cranky boom-sticks, as I call it! I was a bit tired and wanted to have lunch... It was a great opportunity for improvisation. I found that Aeryn was too clean and serious a character to improvise in a way that, say, Crichton would in his environment. Therefore I, as an actor, didn't feel I could really let loose on Aeryn terribly much, but the more she started to soften with Crichton the more room for improvisation [there was] in that regard. There are scenes that are quite intimate between Crichton and Aeryn where she's learning to speak English - that was one of my ideas that I'd threaded through from something from David Camper and one of the other writers. We would feed in those things when we could.

As far as episodes go, on a whole... the two-parter where the Talyn Crichton dies. The sand dune sequences were such fun to film, in those buggies - fanging around as I say: the technical term for driving at high speed in a sand buggy. Shooting on location in Australia when the weather is perfect is just a sublime experience and we look back on that with great fondness.

The Choice was a really stimulating episode for me. I was nervous as hell because I knew I was carrying it individually, really. Gaining an opportunity to work with Paul Goddard as well - he was so lovely to work with; and Rowan. We just all enjoyed working with our stable of recurring directors. [The Choice] was just another opportunity for us to come up with some ideas and play around with the story, and I enjoyed it immensely.

My mother got to return and Linda Cropper is a fabulous woman, a great actress, and really well known in Australia, but also really funny. In between all the very serious stuff where we were having fights, we'd crack up directly afterwards. [It's funny when you think that the character is] so stern and they had such a terrible relationship- so dysfunctional.

There was one particular day where I was shooting a scene in The Choice with my mother and we're standing on the balcony. It's when Crace comes in and shoots her accidentally-on-purpose. I was supposed to catch Linda Cropper, hold her before she dies and have this moment with her where she says 'let me go'. Aeryn finally decides that she should release her mother off a building so that she can splat on the floor below. There were all these safety mats and I went to catch Linda and she fell at a slightly different angle from what I was expecting. I'm totally uncoordinated anyway so I don't know why any actor would ever trust me. I missed, she fell over, we both fell off the wall together, I swore and it was quite funny. I think they removed the swearing from the bloopers. Poor mum... couldn't catch her!

Unfortunately, I am responsible for that voice from the princess character. It was elements of Tennessee Williams and Vivien Leigh, but combined with Mike Tyson trapped in a woman's body. That was really the reference for it, and I was inspired by Miranda Richardson's Queen from the Blackadder series.

There's something very sinister about a woman who is predatory but has an absurd voice working as a disservice to her. Those two things in tandem I thought were very interesting concepts, and I mentioned it to Ben and he loved the idea. I just loved the fact that it would make Ben laugh and, as irritating as it was when I was trying to do serious work with that accent, he'd be killing himself on the other side of camera.

It was just a joy and such a privilege to be in a position where I could play a character that was so different to Aeryn; and [it was] stimulating for me to create something from scratch again. It was fantastic.

Our show ran very differently to most, which is in some ways an enormous privilege, but it also places actors in a position that they may not want to be in. It was a highly collaborative environment which is wonderful, but if the script hasn't been delivered, or it's going through a series of amendments, it puts a lot of pressure on the actors. It's great for the writers because they say, 'you see, you see, you don't want to write the lines now!'. It's a lot harder than it appears, to have a structural understanding of the story.

An episode has to be written specifically to certain timings for the ad breaks and for different countries. It's a complex process. What can and can't be shot within a short time-frame on fast turnaround television is also very complex, so we were the tip of the iceberg when it came to contributions where stories were concerned. It's also a vital part in the sense that it's what's done on set, therefore it's the final product. If something wasn't working on set and the director suggested that we come up with something, then there would be a lot of input in that case.

If we had a suggestion that deviated from the script we would take it up with the writers beforehand. They grew to a point where they trusted us so much that we could either do the option that they'd done on the page and then do our own, or actually asked us specifically to do something that was more suited to us. They would insert something in the script as a benchmark and then expect us to do something that was more flavoured to our specific character traits.

It was more in Ben's domain to improvise because he was the voice of America; he was the human, the voice for all the humans watching the show. He was the one that could bring in the cultural references that the audience would understand and the aliens wouldn't. It did get to a point, though, by the end of first season when we realised there were only so many times we could play that gag of the aliens not getting it. So we had our opportunities to go to earth or simulated versions of earth so the aliens could start to catch up to speed. That is actually, coincidentally or not, the time where we started to collaborate more as actors on set with the words.

I always say, and I think Ben agrees with me, that the best stories are the romantic ones on a large scale. If two characters are meant to be together then nothing will keep them apart. It doesn't really matter where or how season four leaves the two characters, in our minds they were always meant for each other from the moment they met. I think that's what we've asked the audience to invest in from the very beginning.

It was very difficult for the writers to constantly come up with ways to pull them apart and then bring them together again, round and round, to find new ways to do it. We weren't underestimating the audiences intelligence, and the coin-tossing is indicative of that we were trying to find a way through that part of the story in that episode and how we could possibly separate those two characters. I suggested the coin-toss to David. It's not a perfect solution, but it goes along the lines of that huge romantic arc where the characters are placing their love and their destinies in the hands of fate. I said to Ben, David and Andrew Prowse the director, 'if they really are meant to be together, then the coin-toss is a temporary solution and it really isn't going to make a difference in the end'.

Ben and I are total romantics, total softies at heart, and we were always trying to find opportunities in every episode, in every scene. Sometimes there weren't scenes, we'd go through episodes where we'd hardly spent any time together on set at all because it was getting harder and harder to keep us in a room and not justify them not being together. But we'd always be looking for the opportunities on camera to show how much they were drawn to one another, because it's desperately romantic.

Americans love hair, I think more so than any other country so if you can have your hair out I think that's a big plus. It seems to go with the genre as well, to have the wind blowing and the sparks flying and the hair going. We would try and give everyone a mix of everything, so that there was a look that everyone would like � audience, producers, network, everyone.

The practical issue of how my hair would be for each episode began to override all other issues because we were starting to overlap a lot of our shooting schedules. It became impossible for them to allow time to go from one style to another. It flattened out for a lot of season two and season three, where I had the very slicked tight pony. The battle pony was the first one we designed and we were very proud of that. It was that very weird rockabilly front with the loose pony at the end. The slicked look was originally what I'd wanted for the character. I'd wanted her to be quite severe, and I think everyone was a bit nervous about having a leading lady on television with such a harsh look, but it just to me epitomised the true character of Aeryn.

In fourth season David Camper had said he'd wanted Aeryn to look like she'd really been through hell. I wanted a quite punkish 'Run Lola Run' style hair-cut that looked like she gone through some changes. We wanted to work along those lines, but it was a bit hard to convince people to go punk. We ended up creating a three-quarter wig which provided us with the opportunity to not bring me in unnecessarily early to straighten my hair, which is very curly and frizzy. it became a very girlie issue of time and money! If we'd done to my hair every day the way the wig could do for me, it would have fallen out after about 4 weeks of doing it. I was getting closer and closer to the special effects, [but] it was somebody else's hair in the hair piece rather than mine so it was safer. It told the story of Aeryn having been away for a long time. I never expected it to be as long as it was and we had to go through a lot of changes trying to make it work and integrate it, but I quite liked it.

It was the most Gilroy that Aeryn looked, really, in season four. [I had] different make-up artists. There was a high burn out rate, because people worked such long hours. We developed these very strong relationships with the make-up artists, and fantastic shorthand so we'd never have to say anything - we knew exactly what we needed to do every day on set together. I would say to them, 'technically there's not much more you can learn doing my make-up, go off do other shows. Take other jobs, please, otherwise you'll burn out.' So I would always encourage them to go off and do it, even though I knew it would disadvantage me because I'd be losing a great make-up artist.

Every year we'd still get another person in who was fantastic, but the looks would always change because it was someone else's input. I'm of the opinion that I shouldn't dictate how I should look, even though there is a certain continuity. I always liked people to establish the look themselves and try something with my face as a canvas. It gives them an opportunity to be creative, because Farscape essentially was a very creative environment - we wanted everyone to collaborate and feel that they were involved.

I was asked recently when I first started acting. I'd forgotten that my first amateur role was in kindergarten as the lead in the school play and that pretty much gave me the taste for it.I don't mean to compare myself specifically with the likes of Mozart or Beethoven but I really don't think they woke up one day and said, 'I gotta decide... Do I wanna make cakes for a living, or be a composer?'. You're just born with a hunger for certain things and an attraction to the performing arts if you are a performer.

I came from a very musical background and we were always taken out to a lot of theatre from a very young age. My grandmother was a drama, language and music teacher and she always encouraged us and helped me with my French and with music. I suppose people expected that I would be a singer, that I would do opera singing and go and get the training. At that point, in my late teens, even though I'm actually very serious and responsible, I felt that it was too much of a commitment to a particular type of lifestyle. I was very sensitive to smoky atmospheres and things like that. I'd always heard these stories about Dame Joan Sutherland and how, out of respect, when she would come out after a show and go to parties afterwards people would always extinguish their cigarettes. You can't expect the world to stop doing what they're doing.

I would get so stressed out about performing that something would happen to my voice. I'd get a cold from stress, or whatever, so it was like this weird self-sabotage that would happen. I wanted to just give myself a bit of a break and the acting to me was more of a challenge because I expected less of myself. I wanted to work very hard at it and there seemed to be more to learn, because I had this innate sense with the music at a young age. I was just lucky. I was fortunate that I was able to learn - I had no training. I was able to learn on the job.

I apologise to audiences who saw my earlier work but, hey - move on. We learn!

If Aeryn and Buffy went head to head... Well that question has a second part to it! Aeryn does have a pistol so take it as a given!

I think Aeryn would be very well matched with Buffy - I'd like to say that she'd win. I know for sure that if Claudia had to fight, hands down she would lose. Hands down. Claudia versus Sarah Michelle Gellar? Seriously, she's a black belt in karate. I have no chance.

I used to play in the recorder consort at school while she was training to be a warrior. I have got no chance in hell!

I was utterly shocked when I heard that Farscape wasn't going for season five.

There'd been talk about doing thirteen episodes instead of twenty-two, and we would have been very lucky indeed to do the thirteen. It would have been an opportunity for us to finish it on our terms and really feel that we could give it one last burst of energy and creativity. Season four was a difficult one and we all felt that we were owed another chance, but all things end. I think it was better to end it with people screaming for more.

I try not to get attached to things so... the money, of all of those things. Just having a regular income as an actor. In Australia you're never paid terribly well. It's better than not working as an actor but in America there's a residual system, so we do have to now go out and search for more work because it's not the wage that keeps on giving as it is in the States.

I can't believe that I won't see more of Aeryn and Crichton together on screen. That's really hit home for me, the fact that something about them has to crystallise and visually end where we leave it at the end of season four. I am, as I've said before, a desperate romantic and I really believe that what we created is substantial enough between the two of them that the audience will rest assured that there's a happy ending.

I'll miss so many things about not doing Farscape. We'd been talking about it when we were waiting to hear whether we'd get season five. We were all starting to become very sentimental and reminisce a lot. [I'll miss] the people first and foremost. It becomes a family and, unlike other circuses, this one won't move on as an ensemble. We'll all scatter and all the co-production people will go across the world. Australia's a very long way to travel to anywhere from anywhere.

Aeryn was the most incredible character to play - she was just phenomenal. It may sound like bias, but she was definitely one of the most interesting, if not the most interesting, characters. Because she had the greatest development to take place and it was through a man and through love that it was going to happen, it just ticked a lot of my boxes as a performer. Because it was a romantic arc, it was stimulating. A lot of it at the beginning was controlled by the producers and how much they wanted to reveal of her character developing at any given time, but then the story started to take over. The character started to take over in her own way.

I will miss, perhaps more than anything, working with Ben Browder. He was the most incredible leading man, he was a phenomenal working friend and we just had such a great chemistry working together. We just understood each other, and didn't really need to discuss anything. We rarely talked about a scene, we just understood it and would go in and do it. Having that kind of rapport with an actor and it getting better and better... We never had a single fight. We had one tense moment one point in season one, very early on, when I was a bit grouchy and he was very gentlemanly about it. How can I possibly expect to find other colleagues to work with like that? Other leading men - second to none. [I feel] so privileged to have had the opportunity to play both the character and to play side by side with Ben.

The crew are the faces you see every morning and last at night before you go home. I spend more time with those people than I do with my friends and family, so they're forever a part of you and who you become as an actor so I hope I see them again. The fans, I know, will always be there, so I can't miss them because they're not going to go - I don't think!

I went away on the weekend after I'd heard the news about the show being axed and I went through quite a quandary about whether I should stay in town or not. Everyone said, 'look, the show doesn't finishing filming until Wednesday, so go away for the weekend. Come back and come to set on the last night,' - it was either Tuesday or Wednesday, 'and we'll have a proper sort of...'. Whatever it was, we couldn't even call it a celebration.

I was absolutely gobsmacked when I heard that we'd made it onto CNN. I could not believe it - two or three nights. Two consecutive nights, I think, in one week and then the following week. The power of the group astonished me.

I've always been delighted by the Farscape fans when I've met them, but knowing that they were true to their word and would do whatever they could... Just knowing that it was a project that they cared so much about that they were willing to fight for it was touching, to say the least. Sadly now I don't know if there's much that we can do to save Farscape. The sets have all been pulled down, everyone's sort of scattered to the four winds and, if there was a movie... We always joke and say that it would probably be with Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts just to get the money for it. Brian says there's no way that that's possible, that it can't be made without us, but I think what we achieved is phenomenal.

I think something like 5 percent of all TV shows around the world make it to a fourth season so we should all be really proud of that. The fans accomplished so much to begin with just by supporting the show the way they did.

Sci-Fi Channel took such a huge gamble making Farscape in the first place. We were lucky that it ever happened. Brian had been shopping around for five years to get someone to buy the concept, so to me it was a blessing to have that marriage with the Sci-Fi Channel. I hope the ratings for the final episodes of season four knock their socks off - knock everybody's socks off!

We've enjoyed incredible success here in Britain, which excites us a lot. I don't know if everyone's aware how much we enjoy hearing that it's doing well here. It means a great deal just knowing that it's being seen, that it's being appreciated beyond the States.

I've been amazed by the support we've had from everyone. All things end in one way or another, and I'm just hoping that all the fans will stick with us and that we'll choose projects that they'll continue enjoying.

[It's] very sad.

I haven't had time to take any other work. Once this convention is over, I'm pretty much a free agent and I'm sure that's when it will all hit home that I'm truly unemployed.

One of the difficulties of not knowing for so long whether we were doing a fifth season or not was that we weren't really allowed to go out shopping for work. [That was] because we couldn't be counted on to turn up for work if Farscape kept going, so there may be a large gap. I don't know long it will be and that may be enforced by the fact that I'm having to really take care over what projects I choose. It may just be that, you know, nothing comes up and, as we say in the trade, I'm resting.

People told me, when I was coming through the ranks, that a mark of a great actor is one who deals with the period of unemployment as well as they deal with the period of employment. Well, I'll have to work on that! I do need a break - we really worked so hard on Farscape that I will enjoy having a break.

I feel that I'm at my best as a person and that I'm coming home when I walk on to a set, or on to a stage, so if I can perform in one way or another I think I'll be okay.