In honor of the 10th anniversary of Farscape, the American SciFi Television track welcomed Lani John Tupu, Virginia Hey, Claudia Black, and Ben Browder to the stage in the Centennial Ballroom on Saturday. Ben Browder opened the panel by warning the audience that the panel was being broadcast on DCTV and to watch what was asked and, he remarked, what they were wearing as he didn’t know duct tape was a fashion. Claudia Black playfully admonished him that, at Dragon*Con, duct tape was evening attire.
Claudia let everyone know that, as she was pregnant at her 2007 Dragon*Con appearance, she did get her house renovated and had her baby at home as she had planned, and thanked everyone for being so considerate during her last appearance here. The panel queried the audience to see who were fans of the show from the start, who had only been watching the show in the last 3-4 years, and who’d never seen an episode of Farscape; Browder teasingly admonished the “never watched” fans as “the reason [they] were canceled.”
When asked about an episode dealing with their characters switching bodies, Ben and Claudia both joked about how interesting the experience was from a personal and professional standpoint. They were allowed and encouraged to improvise given the subject matter. Improvisation was a common occurrence on the Farscape set given the atmosphere of the show and their Muppet co-stars.
Virginia was asked to expand on her experience of having to have so much blue makeup put on each day; Virginia explained that shaving her hair for the role was the most momentous part of slipping into the character of Zhaan and, once she’d acclimatized herself to that, having the blue makeup applied every day gave her the time to get into character. The panel was asked when they realized how special Farscape was to be a part of; they all replied that they knew from the beginning what a unique project they had signed on for.
