Paul Goddard reprises his role as the Moya's resident mystic, Stark, in the new Farscape mini-series The Peacekeeper Wars.  Joe Nazzaro finds out how the story will pan out for the half-crazed sage, and discovers what mysteries lie beneath the mask...

Masked mystic Stark does very well out of the new Farscape mini-series The Peacekeeper Wars.  "It's a really good story," claims actor Paul Goddard, referring to his role as the semi-unbalanced sage, who acts as the spiritual touchstone for the crew of Moya.  "He starts off very excited at the beginning by finding a Diagnosan to help put Aeryn and Crichton back together, and then he goes through hell at their hands, but by the end, he finds peace. In between there's the wedding, which he gets terribly excited about, so it was a wonderful journey to go on.

"And because he's such an emotionally mercurial character, I was able to play so many different notes with him.  It was easy to find that wonderful balance that is the best of the writing for Stark, which is crazy one minute, and calm and centered the next minute, with this spiritual dimension coming to the fore."

Although Goddard has been hearing rumours about a possible Farscape revival [see sidebar] it wasn't until a few months before filming began that he knew the mini-series had been green-lit.  "I was doing a play for the Sydney Theatre Company, and the woman whose company did the casting for Farscape came to see it, and said 'I've just done an availability check on you!'  I called my agent the next day and they gave me the dates, but we didn't know what my commitment was going to be.  I was in the UK visiting my mother when I started getting e-mails talking about negotiations and the extent of my commitment.  Up until then, I didn't know if they were just going to pop me in for a day here and there, or I was in for the long haul.  So that's when I found out that they wanted me for the whole thing, which was thrilling."

That said, one of the disadvantages to working on an action-packed, FX-laden spectacle is that there's an awful lot of down time while the big scenes are being set up.  "The hardest part of it was sitting around waiting," Goddard admits.  "It's like the old saying: they don't pay me to act; they pay me to wait and I'm happy to do the acting for free.  Because this mini-series was so huge, with the Scarrans and all the other characters, you could sit around for six hours and not do anything and then suddenly get up and do something manic.  I don't remember it being that physically difficult; it was more the tedium of sitting around waiting, and the frustration of not getting to do anything. 

"Whenever I could, I'd go back to my trailer; otherwise you're just sitting in the dark in the studio in an uncomfortable chair, watching your energy go down.  The tricky thing is to be back up and ready to do something, after sitting around, but that's minor compared to the struggles of those people in prosthetics having to sit around in the heat."

One of Goddard's personal highlights from the mini-series is his final scene with star Ben Browder, in which Stark not only reveals his feelings, but also his face beneath the mask.  "What happened with that scene is it suddenly got moved up in the schedule, after one of the actors had a reaction to the contact lenses.  They had to reschedule something, so this scene got slotted in without any notice.  Suddenly we were shooting it the next day, and I had looked at that scene and thought, 'It needs to be rewritten; it's too verbose.'  It definitely needed some work, because it could well be Stark's last moment in the whole series, so it was special because of that.  It was also special because of the transformation and because it was an intimate moment with Crichton that hadn't really been experienced since they first met, so I thought it needed to have a delicacy and finesse to it. [Creature Shop supervisor] Dave Elsey was excited by the idea that he finally got to reveal what's underneath the mask, but frustrated that he too only had 24 hours notice that we were going to shoot it, so he had no time to experiment or try different things.

"The night before, I discussed my concerns with Andrew Prowse about what I thought was redundant and what they were trying to say in that scene, because it was very expository.  It was very much, 'I'm at peace because this has happened and what you did for me here, and now this has happened, and I've managed to do this,' so it was quite disconnected.  By the time we shot this scene, Andrew had rewritten some of it and I came up with a couple of ideas, and then we managed to cobble something together that we were satisfied with.  I've yet to see it, but I was happy on the day the way it all played out."

Looking back over his time on The Peacekeeper Wars, Paul Goddard is pleased with his work on the project, and is looking forward to seeing how the mini-series ultimately turns out.  "I haven't see it yet," he elaborate, "but in terms of the experience, I had a great journey to go on.  We had a 10-week shoot, so there was an intensity that you could work at for those 10 weeks, as opposed to having to sustain it on a series for 30 weeks, or just coming and going as Stark has done over the four series.  I loved working with Brian Henson, and his bits of direction were very helpful and insightful.  And having Andrew Prowse around [as producer] also gave some consistency to it.  The size of the project made it more satisfying, because more time could be taken shooting some moments, and there was a breadth to it that you didn't normally get, so it was very satisfying."

Sidebar 1

Sidebar 2