BBC Cult - Printer Friendly Version
Anthony Simcoe - The actor beneath the make-up talks about playing D'Argo

Not just a normal role in a normal film
  You’ve been playing D’Argo for a few years now. How has your approach changed?

My approach to D’Argo has changed considerably, mainly due to the physical freedom that I’ve now got from the make-up. Initially, I really couldn’t move within the suit, it was such a physically constraining piece of equipment. I couldn’t turn my head.

The real joke on set was that whenever D’Argo had to fight he had to reach back and grab his sword, and I could not grab my sword. It was physically impossible and it would drive me insane. Every time I had to do this we had to cut or find some weird way or some props guy would have to stand behind me and poke the end of my sword forward so that I’d be able to reach back far enough to actually grab my sword out.

I can now concentrate much more fully on the things I should be concentrating on, my relationships with the other characters and the emotional and psychological arc of the character. I don’t have to worry so much about the physical preparation.

Creating a new species, not only a new character, takes so much more preparation and thought than it would for a normal role in a normal film. Initially, I was really worried about how this person talks, how he moves, what his relationship to different things are and now that we’ve established those things and they’re solid we can let them go and just allow him to live and breathe within the world of Farscape.

Takes a lot to kill a Luxan
  You’ve been killed off once this year already - how long do you think D’Argo’s going to be around?

It takes a lot to kill a Luxan. I’m going to be around for a long, long time.

I don’t know what to say apart from that. D’Argo is going to be around as long as Farscape’s around, because it’s a Jim Henson show and I’m the only Jim Henson character there apart from the puppets. I’m feeling pretty solid.

Puppet co-actors
  How do you feel about working with animatronic characters?

I love working with animatronics because it involves working with a whole team of people. It takes up to 6 people to drive Rygel and negotiating a performance with those 6 people is a real joy. It’s a real joy to act with any animatronic concept, especially Rygel.

What do you think of Pilot? I love the pilot set. It’s fantastic because everything else is an enclosed space. The Pilot has his own set in the studio and there’s massive great big ramps off to the side and the rest of the set is filled in with CGI, so you’re really surrounded with this great big black room with this enormous animatronic.

The first time I saw it my eyes almost popped out of my head because it was such an extraordinary creature. When you see it face to face, Pilot is the most extraordinary creation. There’s one guy that stands under the middle and has a great big silver ring around him and he’s responsible for moving the body one side and there’s someone else working the head and then remote control people working the eyes and working the mouth and there’s four other puppeteers in there working the arms and the hands for Pilot. Still after three and a half years when you see all of that suddenly come to life it takes your breath away.

The size of Pilot is quite extraordinary, when you feel him come to life you can’t help but feel that you’re in another universe and that’s really really exciting.

Cutting edge of puppet technology
  Have you tried your hand at operating the puppets?

I have had a go at driving the eyes and the mouth for Rygel remotely. And we’ve all picked up Rygel and held him at certain times and enabled him to live within a scene.

I tell you, it just made me appreciate how difficult it is to drive those things. When you watch the puppeteers, they put their hands inside electronic gloves attached to computers and those computers are attached to the animatronic. When you see the dexterity that they have to go through to create the consonants and vowels in each word it’s amazing to watch.

When you see the amount of rehearsal that those men and women have to go through to get it working as well as it does it’s fantastic. I’ve watched some, I won’t name names, but very famous, very big science fiction films, (cough) Star Wars, and the lip syncing on those characters is absolutely rubbish. Then you watch Pilot and Rygel and you see the dexterity within those animatronics and that’s when you realise that you’re at the cutting edge of where that technology is.

That’s my space ship!
  Do you enjoy working on virtual sets?

I love working with virtual sets because it enables us to create an even larger world than we might be able to with sets.

The directors are fantastic and we have a CGI representative on set all the time so whenever we have to work with the CGI we’re given a really detailed brief by the director and by the CGI representative. We have a very detailed idea of either what landscape we’re looking at or what CGI element we’re interacting with so it’s not as though we feel like we’re acting blind.

Then you have the added joy of seeing the elements roll in one by one, you get the wire frame rig and how the shots have been done and that’s approved and changed by the directors and the producers.

And then eventually you see the whole thing finished and blended together and it’s such a joy. "I’m in a space show, I’m in a space show, that’s my space ship flying, oh my god that was a green screen four months ago, now look at it". This is the buzz.

If you think it would be exciting to do then you’re right, it’s absolutely the coolest thing you can possibly do.

Audition trauma
  How did you feel when you got the job?

When I first got the job I was directing a play and I’d been auditioning and auditioning and auditioning for this role over many, many months. Initially, I thought "All right, it’s this foreign series, shooting in Australia, I’ve got about as much chance of getting this as of winning the lotto." Then I was getting called back and called back and called back until finally I thought "Maybe there’s a possibility that I’ll actually be getting this."

Because I had foreign as well as Australian producers, it meant that the audition had to go this world loop for approval, so every single time you did an audition you’d be approved by Australian producers, the tapes would be sent to London, they’d be approved by the people in London, the tapes would be sent to LA, they’d be approved by the people there, then New York and then back to Australia. You had to jump through all these hoops all around the world and if one person didn’t like you in one city, bang you’re out.

So you’re very nervous every single time. There were so many auditions, the producers were very aware that we were getting more and more tense every single time we had to come in. What we thought was going to be the ultimate audition came up and the producers said "This is going to be the last one – we’ve just got to get approval from London and LA and New York and things are going to be cool". We spent a real long time on that audition - Rockne O’Bannon flew over to Australia and talked us through it.

The tapes went out and I thought "Great, that’s it. Even if I don’t get it, I can let go of the stress and the tension now of whether I do or don’t get this job". Then four or five days later my agent rings up and goes "They didn’t record the sound on your last audition, we have to go back in one more time."

So the stress just came back, and we went back and did another half day’s auditioning with different people. Different combinations of Zhaans and D’Argos actually, at that stage. Then I was away directing and the phone call came from my agent. She said "What do you want to hear?" I said "You know what I want to hear", and she said "I’m telling you that." I just screamed with joy.

I found out on the Wednesday, and they said "Okay you’re due in London on Monday", so a lot of hassles went on there but I was on a plane to London four days later to be life cast and to be covered in rubber for the rest of my life.

Directing an episode
  You’ve mentioned directing for theatre. Would you like to direct an episode of Farscape?

The way that Farscape works, it would be impossible for one of the cast members to direct an episode. There’s two units running at any one time, an A unit and a B unit and so that means that we’re shooting more than one episode at a time. Any time you may think we have some down time, we don’t. If we’re not shooting on A unit we’re shooting on B unit. If we’re not shooting on A and B unit we’re doing ADR (adding on dialogue).

Shooting an episode of Farscape, because it really is such a big, involved and detailed show, takes so much pre-production, not only in terms of negotiating sets and costumes and guest sets but also negotiating the shots with the CGI house and the CGI people. Then you’ve got to shoot it and edit it and then you’re got to re-meet with all the CGI people. It’s a really long process to direct an episode of Farscape, so if you think about taking a cast member out and putting them inside that process you realise it’s an absolutely impossible thing to do.

Advice only D’Argo could give
  What advice would you give a young actor who’s just been offered five years work under heavy alien make-up?

I would say absolutely take the job, grasp it with both hands, enjoy every single second of it because your face will never really relate to the lens in the same way that it will when you’re wearing make-up.

Learn every single thing you can about the film-making process and relish the fact that not many roles these days on film or television allow you to exploit and explore transformation as an actor. Make-up will give you the chance to really draw on your theatrical roots and the roots of your training and really stretch all of your capabilities and skills. Because if you go in there just doing Home and Away soap acting then you’re going to drown and you’re going to die the death of a thousand deaths.

It takes a lot of psychological specificity, lots of deep emotional work and, more important than anything, lots of transformational physical choices need to be made to make science fiction characters or made-up characters live. The amount of work that goes into it and the amount of exploration you have to do to make the character work is a lot more than people would give it credit for.

So if you get that opportunity then you should be thanking your lucky stars that someone has the confidence in you to take that character onto the screen and make it live.

From Dorky Australian to D’Argo
  Do you ever use your D’Argo voice outside work?

The D’Argo voice came about from me and my friends mucking around doing movie trailers. I was just at home going [puts on D’Argo voice] "Can you imagine a time … when Simcoes ruled the earth … Dorky Australian".

How the voice came about is, we were rehearsing the show before we started to shoot the first episode and we could not find a voice for D’Argo. Every voice that we came up with, as soon as we put the make-up on, really did not match the look of the make-up.

Then the problem was that when I would come up with a voice that I thought would match the make-up I was looking like this (with no make-up on) and people would go "Oh, maybe not". I did suggest the D’Argo voice earlier on and people said "Oh no, I don't know"

We got to shooting and we still really hadn’t a hundred per cent decided on anything. I was just about to do my very first take and I walked to the director, panicking like a madman, and just said [uses D’Argo voice] "Look, I really think that D’Argo should speak like this". He was so under pressure and it was so late, he went "All right, fine". It was literally that quick.

Technobabble
  What do you think about the amount of technobabble on the show?

One of the great things about the writers of Farscape is that they’re very aware of technobabble themselves. We don’t see ourselves as a show that purports to demonstrate how science will facilitate the world or how it will work in the future. We really feel that Star Trek does that better than anyone, so we asked ourselves "How can we move away from that?" The specificity of the science isn’t something that we really concern ourselves with.

We see ourselves more as a fantasy adventure romp set on the other side of the universe. So we really don’t come across much technobabble in our texts. We try and find our way away from those problems because the science doesn’t interest us in this show. It interests us but not in Farscape.

Simcoe hyper-rages?
  Do you find the fiery character of D’Argo influencing you in real life?

No, playing D’Argo hasn’t made me more irritable in real life.

I had a wonderful conversation with Wayne Pygram who plays Scorpius when he first came on set. Wayne’s a great friend of mine, I’ve known him for many years. He was saying to me "People aren’t speaking to me, have I done something wrong? Have I upset people?" and I said to him "Listen, something I learned very early from wearing this make-up is that when you’re sitting down, just relaxed, very happy and comfortable, you’re frowning because of the make-up. Everyone thinks you’re angry all the time. So to work against that when you’re not doing takes you actually have to be very lively, be very demonstrative about the fact that you’re okay".

So no, it hasn’t made me more grumpy. Being D’Argo’s actually made me happier and more lively and more energetic on set than I have ever been for any other role. Often I find myself at the centre of fantastic laughter and jokes all the time at work. It’s been a real joy to play D’Argo for how it’s changed me and my outlook on life. And D’Argo himself is softening up a lot as time goes on as well.

Stop laughing all the time.
  What sort of atmosphere do you get on the Farscape sets?

I’ve been working for a long time now on many different sets with different crews from all around the world and Farscape is the most fun set I have ever worked on. Every single department, the cast, the crew, everyone just gets along so well. There are such funny people on set, not just the cast, in fact more so the crew, that I leave every single day crying with laughter. My make-up girl Nick is like "Will you stop laughing all the time, you’re just ruining the make-up for me."

It’s a really fantastic show to work on, and apart from the fun aspect of it the crew and the cast really really want to make it good. I find that really rare on television. On film that happens all the time, but on long running television shows, although people care, and work really hard and they’re dedicated fine artists, there’s something about the fact that they’re doing it week in, week out, month in, mouth out, year in, year out, that starts to make it a little bit stale.

But, every single person on Farscape is really dedicated to making every episode fantastic television. To be around that just lifts my spirits 150 per cent, so working with Farscape is the most enjoyable job I’ve ever done in my life.

Feature film quality television
  Is there anything about Farscape that you feel gets overlooked?

I hope that people realise when they watch Farscape that they’re watching feature film quality work in pretty nearly every department. From the sets, the construction, the wardrobe, which is absolutely gorgeous, the CGI, which is absolutely incredible, the performances, the make-up. It’s all feature quality work crammed into a television show with a television show budget and a television show time schedule.

If people appreciated that we make Farscape in a ten day turnaround, seven days on A unit, three days on a B unit, and if they realised how sets worked, then they’d realise the amount of work and dedication that goes into an episode of Farscape. It’s a lot of people working very, very hard to bring some very high quality work to television.

Don’t burn your action figures
  How you feel about having an action figure made of you?

I LOVE having an action figure. Having an action figure absolutely rocks. Except I hope that people don’t do with their action figures what I did with my Star Wars action figures when I was a kid.

When I was having the fight between the Empire and the good guys and wanted a little bit of realism on my battle set, I would get my storm trooper dolls and my Darth Vader dolls and I would sneak into the house, find my dad’s lighter, come outside and set fire to the storm troopers, to really give the battle some sense of realism. And my mum would go spare. So I hope that when you buy your D’Argo doll you don’t set him on fire.

Full-time party madman looking for full-time party
  When researching for this interview on the internet we found a quote that said you wanted to be a full-time party madman. Is this still your goal?

Yeah, I’m having a good time being a part-time party madman at the moment. As I build up experience in my part-time world, and when Farscape finishes I’m sure that if someone wants to give me the responsibility I will embark into the real world as a full-time party madman. If anybody wants to give me the job.