As the second season of "Farscape" reaches its exciting conclusion, Claudia Black examines her life as Aeryn Sun. Ian Spelling basked in her radiance.
Claudia Black can't help but laugh. "Here, please, take it," the "Farscape" and "Pitch Black" star says to someone, someone who's not an interviewer. The actress, speaking by telephone from Australia, then explains: "We're all here on a Saturday for our third season photo shoot, but they don't have enough prop guns to go around for everyone, so I've just had to give up mine," she says, laughing again. "Amazing, isn't it? Anyway, we should be okay now to talk."
And talk Black does, about the second season of Sci-Fi Channel's breakout hit, about the development of her character, ex-Peacekeeper Aeryn Sun, and about the assorted goings-on in the character's life and in fact, in Black's life and career.
"Aeryn started as a very austere, obviously frightened and hard-edged individual," says Black, as effusive and well-spoken as ever. "We've since seen enormous vulnerability in her. As a performer, it's a real challenge and a privilege to play a character that has such an enormous polarity. She's now almost what we would call a human being, I think. Personally, the second season has been a massive learning curve for me as an actor. I've taken far greater risks this year than I did during our first year. I've really started to consolidate certain aspects of my craft, so I feel more confident on the set and in what I'm doing with the character. And I'm so grateful to the writing department. They gave me some fantastic opportunities in season two."
Black goes on to cite such outings as "Taking The Stone", "The Way We Weren't", the "Look At The Princess" three-parter, "Beware Of Dog", "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "The Locket", not to mention the final four episodes: the "Liars, Guns and Money" trilogy and "Die Me Dichotomy", all of which are airing throughout the month of January (except for the UK where viewers have already been treated to these stories). The last hour, Black teases, contains a "shock" that she politely and understandably declines to reveal. "Even though it's (executive producers) David Kemper and Rockne S O'Bannon's objective to surprise the audience and constantly keep the show fluid, I still found the conclusion of the season very moving", she says. "I think everybody here felt that. It has a very profound effect on everybody who watches it. That probably has a lot to do with the fact that after two years of making this show, playing the characters and watching the episodes that people, the audience and us, the actors and film-makers and writers -have come to love the characters, so that the stakes are higher and we care more deeply about what happens to them."
Looking ahead to season three, which The Sci-Fi Channel will kick off in March of 2001, Black states her hope that the writers will make time for Aeryn to befriend some of the other strong females around her, namely Chiana (Gigi Edgley) and Zhaan (Virginia Hey). She also hopes to see Aeryn display a more philosophical approach to communicating with others now that the character is fairly far removed from her days as a grunt. Also, Black adds, she would like the writers to continue taking chances, as they did in "The Way We Weren't" by gambling that viewers would still care for Aeryn even after it was revealed that she had a hand in killing the Pilot before the one currently guiding Moya.
And what of the ever-interesting Aeryn-Crichton (Ben Browder) relationship? "I think we're always going to be pushing and pulling the characters together and apart, and we're always going to push and pull the audience's emotions and responses to the relationship", replies the actress.
"No one is stupid. We've asked the audience to invest in a connection between those two characters. But they can't go steady. However, there will be passion and there will be romance. And there will be dilemmas and adversities that will continue to separate them and challenge them. I think that with any relationship that at some point may end up being a romantic one, the beginnings of it are always fraught with the complexities of -first of all- friend or foe? And then, secondly, friend or lover? Or, in the case of Aeryn and Crichton, both. We're working on the third season now, but it's really still the beginning of their relationship."
A knock at the door signals that Black is needed back down at the photo shoot, so the conversation must end in a few moments. Before she puts down the phone, however, Black addresses one final matter of importance. It's mentioned to her that when the show first launched she was eager, excited and thrilled to have landed the gig, and she expressed high hopes for her then-fledgling series. During a conversation at the outset of the second season she sounded happy to be back on the set, comfortable with Aeryn, her co-stars and "Farscape's" success, not to mention her new found fame and sex symbol status. Often, as actors embark on their third, fourth and fifth seasons of a show, of playing the same character, of talking about that show and character, they lose their enthusiasm. It's no longer fresh, exciting and new for them, and those realities turn up, in degrees ranging from slightly to all-too-obviously, in their performances, interactions with fans and also in interviews.
"It's still fresh and exciting and new for me, definitely," Black argues. "What's become important to me is maintaining my personal disciplines, my personal disciplines at work and outside of work. I've started to realise how important it is for me to keep my body finely tuned from the inside out. The aesthetic really isn't as important as the inside is for me. As long as I maintain those disciplines I feel very charged and energised. Beyond that, I've learned so much by playing a character like Aeryn over the 44 episodes we've done so far, by working with Ben, by working on such a technical set. You can lose focus because so many dazzling things are going on around our sets. I'm talking about the make-up, the special effects, the animatronic creatures and the sets. I've really learned to focus on the performance while still appreciating everything and everyone around me."
"And as long as the storylines continue to excite us, I'm thrilled to be here. As long as I'm finding new challenges every episode, then I cannot but learn. I did some auditions and also some work during our last break. I did a radio play with Anthony Simcoe called Black Canoe. I also did an episode of "Beastmaster" with Tony, in which I played the mother of a boy running with a pack of wolves. And I also did a guest role, I'd call it, in the film version of "Queen Of The Damned." I play the vampiress Pandora and that was a great opportunity for me. I felt so supported and so fortified by my work on "Farscape," by what I'd learned on the show that it really contributed to my work during the break. And that makes me feel even better about coming back here to "Farscape"."
Article provided by the "Farscape Treasure Chest."
Article typed out by "a lonely farscape fan, somewhere in the universe" and edited by Darren Smith.