Aeryn Sun has been having a tough time lately, as viewers of Farscape’s third season will certainly have noticed. After being brought back to life in the season opener, she had a painful reunion with her mother, Peacekeeper Officer Xhalax Sun (in Relativity), saw Crichton split into two separate but equal beings (Eat Me) and found herself falling deeply in love with one of them only to have him die in her arms (Infinite Possibilities, Part II). During a visit to Valldon, a planet where the dead speak (The Choice), she’s seemingly reunited with her long-lost father and estranged mother, only to lose them both. And returning to Moya, Aeryn now has to face the other Crichton and decide if she can risk losing him too.
Claudia Black isn’t as emotionally battered has her character, but she’s still awfully tired. Just after wrapping up the third season of Farscape, she and her fellow cast members flew to LA for a massive convention, and from there, it was on to New York for a quick publicity tour. Sitting in SCI-FI’s New York offices, it is obvious from her flagging voice that the strain is beginning to show. Maybe so, but Black is still more than happy to spend an hour or so discussing recent events in the life of Aeryn Sun…
This has been an incredibly demanding season for your character, hasn’t it?
It’s been a great season for me. Because they finally got Crichton and Aeryn together, it meant we could play the romantic side of the relationship much more obviously. And Crichton’s death pushed me more into acting in a more tragic spectrum. It’s also the season where Aeryn met her mother several times, culminating in the episode The Choice, where she is left to deal with several issues, including her dead father who she thinks she is meeting. She’s sceptical of course, and then she has to deal with her mother who also she thought was dead -and then she tries to manifest Crichton spiritually so that she can spend some time with him and deal with her grief.
The first season was mostly establishing Aeryn as an action character, and since then she’s developed into someone who’s crossed the line from being what we would think of as alien, to someone who’s a lot more human. So it’s opening up for me. It becomes easier to play even though it’s a little more melodramatic, and I’m expressing more extreme emotions on screen. It’s much more the realm of a human, so it becomes easier.
There’s a very poignant scene in Fractures where Aeryn is reunited with one Crichton while still trying to cope with her loss of the other one. Was that a difficult scene to play?
He’s like a beautiful adolescent excited boy, and it’s such a very sad scene. I saw what Ben was doing in the scene and it made me very tearful as Claudia, but as Aeryn I had to make sure that she was very still and in control and it was very hard. There were only two words that I had to say in that scene, which were “Hello, John,” and they were the two hardest I’ve ever had to do on the show. Jut finding a way to place it so that it included all the emotions that would be going through her at the time, that sense at the end of The Choice where she says to the ghost of John, “You have to go now.” She’s saying she wants to move on, but what she wants to move on to is what she used to know, which is the Peacekeeper way, so she’s operating in this realm of denial. We had to have a lot of discussions with the directors over the last four episodes about how we were going to deal with Aeryn and this other Crichton.
And there are a lot of fractures in the relationships between various characters in those final episodes, aren’t there?
The writers have been slowly building a political context for the characters, so Crichton and Aeryn have got this incredible adversity to deal with, but they’re also confronted with this political situation because there’s this quite heated environment developing around them. So they’re forced to deal with that too, which in a way is a relief because it takes the focus off of them having conversations that Aeryn doesn’t want to have. But it also means that she has to make decisions about whether she’s going to support Crichton or not. I think she decides once and for all that she doesn’t want the Crichton that was on Talyn with her to have died for nothing, so she commits to helping to protect the environment and the galaxy that she knows.
How close did you bring Aeryn to the brink of madness in The Choice?
The most important scene is the one I call ‘the Ophelia scene’ because it is quite Shakespearean in style, where she confronts Crais and Stark out in the corridor. To me, it was the scene where you see how unravelled she is. The dysfunction that the audience witness is in terms of her drinking and being surly and not particularly friendly to people, but we haven’t seen that stillness before, and that scene in the corridor was something that I talked to writer Justin Monjo about. They’d already written it, and I said to him, “You know, it needs to be something quite harsh with Crais, something that really opens up how she feels about Crais and Crichton,” and I was trying to explain to Justin what I meant. I said, “You know, it’s like saying if I squeeze my eyes closed tightly enough, you could almost be someone else,” and he said, “Oh, that’s good!” and he put it in the script. I wasn’t expecting him to do that, but there were some things that we tried to put in the dialogue for Aeryn, some things that I wanted to simplify. It was an opportunity to be subtle in my work, and I didn’t need to do much. I just had to make sure that I was in the right place, emotionally, as an actor, and then when I watched the dailies, I was surprised by the expressions that were coming out through my eyes and on my face, because I realised that as long as I was placing myself emotionally in the right context, the rest would follow visually. And I said to Rowan Woods, the director, “I’ve made this very simple, I’m really playing against what’s on the page, and I don’t want this to become too melodramatic. I want to make it real and still,” because I think that’s more ominous. It really sets quite a sinister tone for the episode, because Aeryn seems to be on the edge all the time.
Can Aeryn bounce back emotionally from what’s happened to her?
I think she makes quite specific decisions. She thinks she’s going to follow it through with Crichton on the command carrier, that’s something that she’s agreed to do. Beyond that, neither the audience or the members of the Moya crew know what Aeryn is going to do next.
I think people will be a little bit surprised in season four, because we’ve already talked about some of the stories, and we’re not going to start the season the way we have before. I think though, in terms of Aeryn bouncing back, people who have been in love and lost their partner to either death or to a break-up, that happens in life, and things don’t work out. It’s like childbirth, if you could remember the pain physically, you’d never have another baby again. I think Aeryn will learn to forget the pain, but I don’t know how good she’ll be at forgiving the universe for handing her the tragedy she’s been endowed with, but you can’t carry it forever. As an actor, I think it’s a mistake. You have to allow the changes to take place, but you also have to push the character and keep pushing them forward so the audience is seeing something mercurial and something that shifts with the environment. I think the environment that the crew members are placed in next season will be instrumental in changing the characters again, as it always has been.
Which do you find more difficult, the physically challenging material or the emotionally challenging material?
When I was younger, I used to dread doing big emotional scenes because you have to pull out the actor’s toolbox and hope that whatever you find will sustain you through the scene. I’ve now got to the point with Aeryn where I’m so emotionally connected to the character and the relationship between Aeryn and Crichton, that when things impact on her, it’s easy for me, because it’s a great place to go as an actor, just to be able to express heightened emotions.
The physical aspects of the job have a residual effect, because we don’t have the time to warm up and I don’t have the time to train or work out anymore. I was doing pilates to keep my body strong, but I haven’t had a chance to do that in over two years. So if we do a big fight scene and I’m doing a lot of head-butting or whatever, I will have a sore neck for at least a week until I can get to a physio to fix it up. It does have a trickledown effect, so in some ways that’s the hardest thing. I think if you’re mentally and emotionally exhausted, you need sleep and you need rest, but you can get over it and work through it. But physically, if you’ve been too tested, it’s going to show in the way that you portray the character on screen, so I always have to try and keep myself supple and cross my fingers.
If you’ve been playing some really emotional scenes, can you just switch off at the end of the day?
Oh yeah, on this show anyway. I’ve worked on a couple of jobs where it was such a dark story that we were telling that I would find it hard to separate myself from it, especially if it’s true to life. There’s such a fantastical element to what were do on this show that I can’t take it home with me. It’s unrealistic, and I can detach myself the minute I walk off the set because I’ll walk into a normal room and I’m back to reality. If I’m doing a gritty drama about serious issues like sexual abuse or death, if it’s close to the bone, say, if I’ve experienced death recently close to me, then it might be hard for me to avoid the grief process which will come through as I head home. The biggest problem is when things from your life start impacting on the work, so as long as I can stop that from happening, I’m all right.
On that subject, how tough was it to cope with the death of Aaliyah, with whom you recently worked on Queen of the Damned?
It’s hard, especially when you’re signing autographs in a queue at a convention. I owe her the right opportunity to speak about her and my experiences about her, and I was devastated when I heard. I’d had a very bad dream about someone dying the night before. I actually rang a friend of mine and said, “Take it easy this weekend, I’m worried about you,” and then got the news about Aaliyah. I’m confident that every person who met her, every person who came into contact with her would have nothing but beautiful thoughts to say. She was too good for this world, she really was. The only reason I’ve avoided talking about it was out of respect somehow, and also in denial because if I talk about it, it means it really happened, so when people started bringing it up, I would suddenly fall quiet and get glazed in the eyes.
It’s strange, the parallels we’re talking about between fiction and real-life, and yet some of the thought processes are the same, aren’t they?
It’s like multi-tasking. It’s an ongoing process, and there’s an ongoing internal dialogue where you just have to remind yourself -people always say, “Happy thoughts, think of a good place.” All emotions are good, you just have to recognize them and then make sure that you don’t act out inappropriately in front of other people. I don’t want to project any of my negative feelings onto people who have become unsuspecting victims of it, so it’s just a matter of turning it around and making sure I enjoy the people while they are there with me, and finding positive ways to deal with it. I’m just glad that Aaliyah was such an exceptional person, and that people will have such wonderful things to say about her, but I’m devastated for her family and friends.
Have you been doing any work between seasons three and four, or are you taking the opportunity to recharge your emotional batteries, so to speak?
I’ve been working incredibly hard, but I like to work and if the opportunities are there, I’ll take them. I love to travel, so if I get the opportunity, I’ll probably do a bit more travelling during this break, which would be terrific.
It’s a matter of finding time on either side of the work to actually see people that you want to see. My family lives in London and I haven’t seen them in years because I’ve never had time to go over there, and now that the show is huge, it means the press will be receptive, but it would give me very little time to see my dear ones.
It opens up the opportunities, you just have to make them work for you. I’m so exhausted right now, because in L.A. we were doing meetings and press during the day and dinner meetings at night, and I’m operating on so few hours of sleep right now, but you just have to find a way to do it. I’ll collapse in a heap when I go back to Sydney, Australia, and then move house, which I’ve got to do, so that’s still looming -I’ll need another holiday after that! I’m not going to take another job just because I want to work or I’m going to feel the anxiety of being a non-working actor for a little while. I’m going back for season four, so I know I’m going to be working. But if the right film script came up, or the right guest role on a TV show, I’d take it.
Farscape: The Official Magazine No.6 April/May 2002
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