The first thing to strike you about Farscape's Paul Goddard is his hair. He has some!  Unlike his television counterpart, the bald mask-wearing Stark, Goddard has long flowing goldilocks that make him look astonishingly like Starsky & Hutch's David Soul.  We waste no time in pointing this out to him, much to his good-natured bemusement.

We're also ashamed to admit that the actor's follicle-frenzied head was so unexpected that nobody from SFX recognised him until he was introduced to us at the Friday night cocktail party.  We'll carry the guilt to our graves, although Goddard didn't seem to mind, because he's a very nice man.  A very very nice man, as those ladies in the old AA adverts used to say.  He's easygoing, warm, fascinated by the entire concept of our convention, and elated to to see so many people with the same sci-fi passions in one place.  And Farscape fans, at that.

Many of the passionate throng want to know one thing: ill Stark return for the show's fourth season?  "I haven't been told whether I can say or not," Goddard smiles, teasingly.  "If I wasn't coming back I'd be under no obligation to remain silent, so the fat that I'm remaining silent...you can draw your own conclusions!"

And so he will be back, appearing in a handful of episodes, probably as nutty as ever.  What does he think about the way his character has popped up here and there during the course of the show, the vanished for long stretches?

"It's good to come and go, because it's pretty intense.  when I first did a couple of guest bits in season one Claudia Black said to me, 'Just come back as a semi-regular; do guest slots every now and again; then you have your freedom, you can go and do other stuff.'  And I was thinking, 'I'd like to be there permanently!' But after doing a stint of a number of months, it was quite good to go off and do a play and come back refreshed."

That's not the only reason that Goddard likes wandering away from Moya for a while every now and then.  "It's good taking a break, too, because Stark's quite a disempowered character!  It's nice to get away and do something where my status is a bit higher," he says, with a chuckle.

He cites David Helfgott (the main character in the movie Shine) as and influence on his portrayal of Stark's neuroses, along with Jack Nicholson's performance in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest; which may or may not be a good thing.  Perhaps Stark is a little too...unbalanced?

"I started to go online at one point," Goddard says, ruefully, although he doesn't mention what he found there.  Whatever it was, it made him want to change the Banik slave into something a bit more exciting.  "I found that there was a desire in me to make him more likeable, less erratic, and more glamorous.  I remember talking to Claudia about what a dog he was, and watching him run down a corridor and thinking, 'I hate that!  I want to be cool like everyone else!'  Even Rygel!  Chiana's cool, D'Argo's cool and hyper-masculine, Crichton's super-cool in that American way, and Aeryn's cool in that super-cool way...even Pilot has a dignity!  But Stark is really a nerd."

Ah, we point out, Stark's the kind of nerd who get picked on at school but plots revenge behind everyone's backs.  Goddard likes the idea.  "Yeah, he's plotting away at home and they have no idea that he's poisoning the school lunches!"  

It's true that Stark is low down in the Farscape hierarchy, but you have to bear in mind the fact that the character does act like a maniac.  Goddard puts his alarming behavior down to "cultural differences", wondering whether all the other members of the Banik race would act the same way.  Which means that Stark could be sane, after all.

"In the first two episodes it was revealed that the craziness was bit of a ruse," Goddard declares.  "There was the possibility that eh was completely sane after that.  The beauty of the character was that you had on the one extreme this calm, spiritual side, and on the other side this zany, highly neurotic side, and I think it as a shame to lose either dimension."

We can't imagine what it must be like to work on such a crazy show - Farscape is exhausting to watch; lord knows how tiring it must be to make.  Goddard doesn't disagree.  "Some of the scripts arrive very late.  And everybody's running behind, and it's kind of like running downhill: you have to try and make sure you don't fall over."  For some people, it's more exhausting than for others.  "For Stark, I'm like, five minutes in make-up and there I go!  With Anthony [Simcoe] it's a dag sometimes...they have to keep the air-conditioning on because if it reaches a certain temperature they have to stop, it gets too much for him."

And then there's the whole "glowing face thing" whenever Stark removes his mask.  Not that he does that much.  "It' costs too much money!"  Goddard laughs.  "The FX supervisor came up at the launch party and said, 'Do you know how much it costs, every time you take your mask off?'  And I went, 'Wow! You're joking! Pay me that and I'll just glow for you! You can get sunshine out of my every orifice for that kind of money!"

Changing the subject hurriedly, some might remember Goddard from his role as Agent Brown in The Matrix.  The smash-hit movie, as he tells it, "provided me with enough income to say, I can afford not to take theatre for a period."  The freed him up for television work...and Farscape.  "I went for Scorpious originally," he says, "and then a couple of weeks later I was offered the role of Stark."

So The Matrix changed his life?  "It did, yeah!"  Goddard nods.  "I moved to the country, which was a dream of mine."

What surprised him most about life after he appeared in the film?  "The number of women who said to me, 'Oh, I loved that film!'  You wouldn't have thought they'd be the audience for SF. But the audience has changed, what with Buffy...they've brought a bit of sex into it.  and Farscape, too!"