Farscape star Claudia Black (Aeryn Sun) recently visited the SCI FI Channel offices in New York, and took the opportunity to talk to SCI FI Wire about her upcoming SF film, "Pitch Black."
"Pitch Black" is currently scheduled to hit theatres in January 2000 and stars Vin Diesel, Radha Mitchell and Cole Hauser in a story that has been likened to Scream in space.
In the film Black, a native of Australia, plays the supporting role of Shazza, a biologist who specializes in extraterrestrial life forms. Shazza and her husband Zeke are passengers aboard a starship that crash lands on a planet which is usually bathed in perpetual sunlight but which falls into total darkness once every 60 years. Unfortunately for the stranded passengers, when darkness falls a variety of vicious creatures wake up from 60 years of sleep and begin eating anything that moves. Zeke quickly falls prey to the nighttime carnivores, and it becomes clear that the only hope of the survivors lies in a convicted murderer named Riddick (Diesel), whose eyes have been enhanced for night vision.
"The job came up and I thought that it was exciting because it was a big budget by Australian standards," Black said. "It was a groovy story. I thought it was quite interesting and it had a few original concepts in it that I liked. And it was a nice way to get into feature films without having the burden of a lead role for my first feature."
Unfortunately for Black, she was still filming Pitch when the Farscape producers began looking for someone to play Aeryn Sun, and she almost missed out on the TV role. "The Pitch Black producers had enormous troubles making me available, and they had to delay the shoot of the principal photography on Farscape until I was ready to come." However, things worked out in the end, and playing Shazza even helped Black prepare for her role as the tough-as-nails Sun. "Shazza was a nice stepping stone to Aeryn," Black explained. "It was good to find that sort of raw, strong physicality in Shazza."