Your new look in season four is very different to earlier seasons, with the loose hair and so on. Did you have a say in it? (Question from Ishani Guhanthakurta)Americans love hair, I think more so than any other country so if you can have your hair out I think that's a big plus. It seems to go with the genre as well, to have the wind blowing and the sparks flying and the hair going. We would try and give everyone a mix of everything, so that there was a look that everyone would like, audience, producers, network, everyone.
The practical issue of how my hair would be for each episode began to override all other issues because we were starting to overlap a lot of our shooting schedules. It became impossible for them to allow time to go from one style to another. It flattened out for a lot of season two and season three, where I had the very slicked tight pony. The battle pony was the first one we designed and we were very proud of that. It was that very weird rockabilly front with the loose pony at the end. The slicked look was originally what I'd wanted for the character. I'd wanted her to be quite severe, and I think everyone was a bit nervous about having a leading lady on television with such a harsh look, but it just to me epitomised the true character of Aeryn.
In fourth season David Kemper had said he'd wanted Aeryn to look like she'd really been through hell. I wanted a quite punkish 'Run Lola Run' style hair-cut that looked like she gone through some changes. We wanted to work along those lines, but it was a bit hard to convince people to go punk. We ended up creating a three-quarter wig which provided us with the opportunity to not bring me in unnecessarily early to straighten my hair, which is very curly and frizzy. it became a very girlie issue of time and money! If we'd done to my hair every day the way the wig could do for me, it would have fallen out after about 4 weeks of doing it. I was getting closer and closer to the special effects, [but] it was somebody else's hair in the hair piece rather than mine so it was safer. It told the story of Aeryn having been away for a long time. I never expected it to be as long as it was and we had to go through a lot of changes trying to make it work and integrate it, but I quite liked it.
It was the most Gilroy that Aeryn looked, really, in season four. [I had] different make-up artists. There was a high burn out rate, because people worked such long hours. We developed these very strong relationships with the make-up artists, and fantastic shorthand so we'd never have to say anything - we knew exactly what we needed to do every day on set together. I would say to them, 'technically there's not much more you can learn doing my make-up, go off do other shows. Take other jobs, please, otherwise you'll burn out.' So I would always encourage them to go off and do it, even though I knew it would disadvantage me because I'd be losing a great make-up artist.
Every year we'd still get another person in who was fantastic, but the looks would always change because it was someone else's input. I'm of the opinion that I shouldn't dictate how I should look, even though there is a certain continuity. I always liked people to establish the look themselves and try something with my face as a canvas. It gives them an opportunity to be creative, because Farscape essentially was a very creative environment - we wanted everyone to collaborate and feel that they were involved.
