By FIONA BARBER
Ben Browder counts his blessings that he does not need tinting or tentacles. As a non-alien in Farscape (TV3, 7.30 pm) he doesn't have to endure "50 pounds of latex or 30 gallons of paint" to achieve the required on-camera look. His only costume is his Nasa gear.
Browder plays Commander John Crichton, a 20th-century American astronaut who has a nasty intergalactic accident - he is hurled across galaxies and ends up in a spacecraft full of disparate alien refugees.
These include a Delvian priestess (the blue one), a brutish Luxan warrior (the one that looks like a giant shrimp) and a puppet character (testimony to the involvement in the project of the Jim Henson Com-pany).
And, from the now-extinct planet City Life, comes Claudia Black. One of the core cast of the short-lived New Zealand twentysomething drama, she plays peacekeeper Aeryn Sun.
The Farscape series is shot in Sydney but is yet to screen there. It's now being shown on a sci-fi channel in the United States as well as on TV3.
Browder has been in Sydney since September and reckons he's now "terribly Aussie," although he was born in Tenessee, raised in North Carolina, went to university in South Carolina and drama school in London.
Yet he seems slightly surprised to find himself Down Under.
"Australia and New Zealand are at the other end of the world - it's not on the part of the map we looked at when we were growing up as kids."
What he did see as a youngster was 2001:A Space Odyssey. It was then that he decided to become an astronaut. And he came closer than most of us.
Browder got the job as Commander Crichton after five or six meetings over a couple of months with the Farscape makers.
"They just got exhausted and said, 'Okay, okay, we'll take this guy.'"
That followed a stint as Neve Campbell's carpenter boyfriend in Party of Five, roles in television movies and a part in the big-screen film Memphis Belle.
Browder says both Farscape and his character Crichton have evolved quite a bit.
"I watched one of the early episodes and it's like looking at baby pictures. You start a show and you don't know where it's going to go."
And the programme has something which doesn't often emerge in sci-fi series - humour.
Or as Browder puts it: "Farscape is not what you call hard science fiction."
Not a bad living amoung aliens of Oz
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.