Feature: Farscape

Raelee. Saying something…

Literally crashing into John Crichton’s life in the new season of Farscape, Raelee Hil brings a seemingly benign presence as Sikozu to the good ship Moya.

How much did you know about Farscape before joining the cast? Even though the show is filmed in Sydney, it had only just started to air in Australia at the time you shot your first episode.

We had only seen snippets of it in Australia and I have to admit that I hadn’t seen any of it. I knew some other Australian actors who had done the show before. I knew that it was the type of filming that you just don’t get the opportunity to do very often here in Australia. We just don’t do this Sci-Fi kind of thing. We don’t have that sort of cult base for it here in Australia, so I knew when it came along it was going to be an opportunity that I couldn’t afford to miss. Who gets a chance to play like this every week? When I was offered a role on it, I jumped at the chance.

Did someone from the production send you a truckload of tapes so that you could familiarize yourself with the Farscape universe and its characters?

Yeah, they were really onto it. They sorted me out with a whole heap of tapes. I also got the Farscape bible. It talked a little bit about the alien language and that put me in the picture. I chatted with the cast members. I chatted with the writers’ department a lot, as it’s their baby. If you had any questions you called them up. So I definitely had a crash course in Farscape the weeks preceding my contract signing.

How did David Kemper describe Sikozu to you? And how did the character change between inception and the time when you actually came to shoot scenes?

In the early days, she did change around a lot. We didn’t quite know where we were going to place her. I knew that she was going to be a brainiac and that she was going to be very cerebral – very intelligent. I was under the impression that she would be more of a chameleon kind of character, which has since changed.

It’s intelligence in other life forms and other aliens and other people that turns her on as well. She’s quite physical. I was told that she wasn’t really a fighter when she first arrived. That’s something that she has learned very quickly since being on Moya.

Another asset of hers is that she’s a fast learner. She has a photographic memory. You can show her an encyclopedia and she’ll suck it up real fast. She’s very clever. I love the way she is so curious. I love that, and she’s very upfront about it.

She comes across, I guess, as being quite arrogant, but she’s not. She just doesn’t pull any punches. If she doesn’t like someone, she’s not going to go out of her way to befriend them. She doesn’t go out of her way to offend, having said that. She’s just very upfront, very direct. I love her intelligence. I love her curiosity about knowledge and her drive and thirst for it. I love her insatiable appetite in that respect.

by Ian Spelling

The adventures of Sikozu continue in:
Starburst Special #54

Photos © Sci-Fi
Feature © Visual Imagination 2002. Not for reproduction

Taken from

Starburst Special #54
Star Trek 2002
ships from Oct 17 2002
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UK £4.99 / US $9.99

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