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Jonathan Hardy - Veteran actor and writer, best known as the voice of a muppet.
A long career
Tell us about your background and how you joined Farscape.
I'm a New Zealander, born in Wellington, where they shot Lord of the Rings. I trained in New Zealand and I had a scholarship to go to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, where my contemporaries were people like Martin Shaw and Brian Cox.
I spent ten years in England, I was at the RSC and the National and Bristol Old Vic, and then I returned and worked in Australia and New Zealand with all the main theatre companies there, television and film.
One led to writing Breaker Morant and I got nominated for an Academy Award, and then, in my old age, they decided that they needed somebody for this job.
I didn't know what it was, so I turned up, and suddenly somebody said to me, "Hallo, you're my Rygel." I didn't know what they were talking about, but it turned out that I became Rygel. Because of that I'm now flying all over the world.
What else could one do to culminate a career than to become a very great international star as the voice of muppet?
Rygel the hero
Was working in science fiction a big change for you?
No, I have done some before. I did a thing called Andra in Australia a few years ago which was genuinely terrible.
Essentially it's a case of Rygel being in many ways the most human of the characters, although he's a Hynerian and only 2 foot 8 or whatever. He is a commentary on humanity I guess.
Because he is free to be an alien, he can be greedy and selfish and generous and heroic, and all those things that all of us are if we get in the right position. So in many ways, because he is so flawed and in many ways so great, I guess he is an archetypal human being. And I love him, he's a sweet little guy.
What were your favourite aspects of Rygel's character?
I like it when he bites people, and when he farts helium.
But I love the way he is like humanity unmasked. He's capable of greatness and capable of incredible selfishness, and yet capable of real sacrifice when needed. The great thing, for all this, when he was actually in trouble in the series, the other characters came and rescued him when he was being abducted. All those characters on the ship, while they are the best of enemies, they are really bonded and very loyal to each other.
It's been more than just a job. And we've had some great writing on it too, which helps enormously.
Down to Earth
Rygel seemed particularly at home on Earth.
Yes, all that wonderful stuff of Rygel getting a sugar hit and saying, "What, you pay for this dren?"
When we first spoke about him we thought about Hamlet, which sounds extraordinary, but the thing about Hamlet is that he is an amazing character because he's only revealed by his interreaction with other happenings and other people. And this is what we stuck to with Rygel. Rygel can be anything, and depending on his circumstances and what he wants, he'll react quite differently to things.
I think that's a very human ability. Our very erraticism is what makes us different, isn't it? Rygel follows a very clear line, but under those circumstances, he gets back to Earth, he can deal with it, because he's always been a refugee. Also, he doesn't have to conform to received norms, he is how he reacts at that moment, and that's what the great thing about doing it has been.
Rygel the writer
With your screenwriting experience, were you tempted to write a Farscape episode?
Well, I did, and I think it went into another episode as a useful contribution, but I really didn't have much time.
My contract on Farscape [said] that when they needed me for each episode, they would fly me in from any part of Australasia, so I was flying from Perth when I was doing the Year of Living Dangerously, from New Zealand, and from far North Queensland where I was lecturing for a bit.
I didn't have all that much time to write, but I've been rather inspired to start writing again. I've got a couple of films in train that may well come up, one of which is a horror film which I'll probably try and direct myself.
Have you directed before?
Well, I was going to direct The Man from Snowy River. I cast it, and suddenly collapsed, and had to have a heart transplant. In that sense I've got something in common with Rygel, I've got somebody else's heart, so I'm a bit alien myself.
Ooh. I hope it's bearing up alright.
Well, I've had it for sixteen years, and they keep prodding it and I haven't fallen over yet. I've suffered no rejection, except for the emotional rejection I always get. [Jonathan puts on a sad, affronted voice]. I look like Rygel. I'm a small, ugly New Zealander with big eyebrows.
Ah, I once said you and Rygel had similar eyebrows.
Theoretically, Rygel doesn't have eyebrows, he has earbrows.
When they get this big, it's like looking out from under wisteria. Still, I've got a very big hedge clipper at home, so maybe I could just fall into that for a moment.
Puppet power
Did you try your hand at operating Rygel?
No. We abused the puppeteers a lot, but no, I couldn't do that.
I'm told that Rygel was such a complicated puppet, that there was even more that could have been done with him, but nobody ever quite mastered him completely.
Did you adapt your character to individual puppeteer's styles?
No, we had to do the opposite.
I think there were three or four people who had a go at doing the voice. [Note - Rygel was voiced by the puppeteers during filming, and Jonathan's voice added later]. There was anything from a Mancunian to, at one stage, a girl.
A lot of the very hard work we had to do was integrating the puppeteer's voice with the text and the lip synch, because the puppeteers are obviously not actors. Also, you can't indulge in improvisiation, so it was a bit funny like that.
Small world
Was voice work something that interested you before?
Voice work? I'd never done it before in my life.
It was very funny, because while I was doing Farscape, I did all the workshops on Moulin Rouge [in which he played The Man in the Moon]. Then I went off to New Zealand to direct an opera, and then my assistant director on that had had to do an opera in Sydney because Baz Luhrmann couldn't do it because he was doing Moulin Rouge.
Then he went off to St Petersburg to do an opera there, but the conductor couldn't be there because he was Placido Domingo, who was in London voicing me in Moulin Rouge, which I thought was hilarious. Round and round the world we all go.
An actor's lot
Did the cancellation come as a great shock to you?
Well, actors are always facing that.
Nobody's told me it's stopped yet, I've heard that it's stopped, but I haven't been told officially yet. Such is the life of an actor.
I was doing a lot of other things, and while I love Rygel and was very attached to him, it's an actor's lot always to let go like that. And this wasn't half as bad as [some times]. I've been on television shows where they've walked in and said, "Right, it's cancelled, there are security all over the place, do not take anything." Suddenly it all turned nasty. It wasn't like that on Farscape at all.
A lot of people have been quite upset by it, they were very attached to it. If something comes back from it, that would be lovely.
Farscape's real future
Is there any truth in the rumour about a mini-series?
Oh, there's always rumours about mini-series.
We were thinking of doing a spin-off called Rygel PI, in which Rygel goes round and solves all these mysteries. We even suggested he might carry a glove puppet that looked like Tom Selleck.
Or we thought of Judge Rygel, who takes bribes and does all those things, like Judge Judy. That would be quite fun.
I've also heard of "Son of Farscape" where Scorpius and Rygel look after the child of Claudia and Ben [sic].
I don't think anything can happen while it's still going through it's contractual phase with the SciFi Channel and things. A lot of people talk, but what will happen, I don't know.
Cliff-hanger or closure?
Were you happy with the final storylines of the series?
That is a debate. Some people like to be left on a cliff edge, and other people like to feel they know what happened.
Dramatically, yes, it would have been nice to round it off, but sometimes people over-round things off, so I don't know.
I don't know what they had planned for the fifth season. If Rygel had become dominant and taken over the universe, I think that would have been an appropriate ending.
How do you think Rygel would have developed in the fifth season?
Rygel's character develops in relation to his circumstances, so whatever circumstances came up, he'd have been revealed as being something else. So much was in the hands of the writers and of David Kemper, who was the guiding genius behind it.
Rygel is in many ways the one with the greatest overview, and sees through to the reality of what is happening with all the human beings. Rygel could go anywhere and be great fun to go with.
Top tales
Which were your favourite episodes?
I liked the ones where [Rygel] came back to Earth, but I also liked the one where he fought off Durka, early on. I thought he was very noble in that. He was prepared to sacrifice himself to save the others, which was great.
I did like the one where Claudia had to admit that she was the one who had killed the original Pilot, which I thought was a great piece of acting on Claudia's part.
Hard worker
Jonathan tells us about his other projects, past and present.
I wrote a New Zealand film that did well in England called Constance, it won the London Film Festival I think.
I don't write films very often because trying to get them up is frustrating, and it takes a long time, and by the time you've finished doing it, you've had people cutting bits out of it, and you wonder why you ever bothered in the first place. Such is the life of a film writer, as in Adventures in the Screen Trade.
It takes a lot of quiet personal contemplation writing a film, and I've just never stopped as an actor virtually since 1965 when I left drama school. Getting time out to actually write is not easy.
I've been doing a play in New Zealand which may come to London with Greta Scacchi. It's called A Tree Falling and is about Alzheimers, and is very good. I'm also doing a solo show on Edgar Allan Poe, so I've been practicing my Nevermore.
The difference is that in Australia we have to work all the time to stay alive because we don't get residuals.
His Dominar's voice
Would you be able to do a little spot of Rygel for us?
I can't do it without Rygel in front of me!
I really can't do it. I find it impossible without Angus Robertson, the head of ADR [additional dialogue replacement], an absolute genius who got us all through very sticky times.
[He'd say], "There we are, there he is, we've got him", and then I'd go on. When you're playing Willy Loman and you come rushing back and try to find Rygel again, it was very difficult. And I'm buggered if I can put on his voice now.