Claudia Black interview about Farscape to bbc in sept 2005
Apparently many pranks are pulled on set — have you been responsible for any yourself ?
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.
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