GUIDING LIGHT’s Gina Tognoni and Robert Bogue (Dinah and Mallet) hold forth on everything from sudden weddings to those steamy love scenes to…Rod Stewart?
Soap Opera Weekly: When Mallet cheated with Harley, did you think that the Dinah/Mallet romance might be over before it began?
Gina Tognoni: That was a bit of a glitch (laughs).
Robert Bogue: Yeah, that wasn’t fun. I don’t mind obstacles. They have to have obstacles, but it was too early in their courtship. They were floating along in a nice romantic bubble there, and that was too much conflict too early.
Tognoni: (Giving Bogue the once-over) Are these your show pants?
Bogue: No, these are mine. I decided to dress like an English rock star. I wore spandex in the pouring rain.
Tognoni: Those are very Rod Stewart, honey.
Bogue: In a retro way or in a big ’80s way? Which era?
Tognoni: The Rachel Hunter years.
Bogue: That’s okay. I like “Young Turks.”
Weekly: Back to the show…Dinah and Mallet married very quickly, in a single “Inside the Light” episode. Did you want to see their engagement and wedding planning play out longer?
Tognoni: Honest answer, I would have liked to have seen it played out a little more. Not for gratuitous reasons, but because the audience deserved that.
Bogue: I agree. The speed made it more romantic because of the way Dinah and Mallet are. To a certain degree, if they hesitate, Dinah and Mallet tend to get heavy about stuff and it ends up killing the romance. The speed allowed them to actually get married, because Dinah didn’t have time to doubt it, but I think it short-changed them as a couple because that whole story happened in one day.
Weekly: I know that Mallet is sterile, but now that your characters are married, would you like them to find a way to have a child?
Bogue: We don’t say [sterile].
Tognoni: Yeah, we don’t like to say that.
Bogue: He’s a eunuch. Based on old Alan-Michael history, he planted the bomb and Mallet diffused it, but it blew up. Now Mallet’s supposedly not able to have kids, which is why Harley and Mallet unraveled — because Mallet felt like he wasn’t a man.
Weekly: Look at you, doing all your character research!
Bogue: Baby, I walk onto the set prepared. We’ve still got a lot of stuff to play and then we’d started doing doing the diaper thing, right?
Weekly: Gina, you haven’t gotten any pregnancy envy while other actresses have been playing pregnant over the past couple of years?
Tognoni: No, I did that for almost a year. No, thank you.
Bogue: There is so much [other] stuff that Dinah and Mallet can do.
Tognoni: When Gina gets pregnant in her real life, then we’ll worry about your impotence problems. We’ll figure that one out. Believe me, we can.
Weekly: Dinah and Mallet are a very passionate couple. Are you comfortable with all of the sex scenes?
Bogue: [Thankfully], there’s more stuff to play now, because there’s no romantic payoff if you’re always having sex. But I wouldn’t want them to stop writing [love scenes], because there has to be a certain temperature between characters. But for a while, we were having sex and weren’t owning up to anything as characters.
Tognoni: But now we can have stuff to go through.
Bogue: Now we can have rage-filled sex.
For more with Tognoni and Bogue, check out the June 5 issue of Soap Opera Weekly.
