Risa Dorken’s Hollywood story began in a decidedly unglamorous setting, one she describes as “really rural Minnesota — gravel roads, chickens in the yard.” She discovered her passion for performing when her mom enrolled her in dance class, hoping to help her high-energy 3-year-old channel some of her natural vivacity. When that exhausted its usefulness (“As I got older, girls got more flexible and taller and it just wasn’t a good fit for me”), the little girl who was reared on classic musicals like Meet Me In St. Louis switched her focus to voice lessons. “That’s when I really got the bug.”
Dorken convinced her mom to let her audition for community theater, and at the age of 8, she began doing professional work at the Minneapolis Children’s Theatre. After high school, she headed to Manhattan for a two-year conservatory program in musical theater — and experienced major culture shock when she landed in the tony Upper East Side, a neighborhood she chose “because it was all I knew based on SEX AND THE CITY.” Her first year was so rough, she almost didn’t return for a second one, but she got a pretty big reward for sticking it out: She met her future husband, Bo Clark (see sidebar), when he enrolled in the same school and she was assigned as his mentor. “I was just so drawn to him. We were both dating other people when school started — and two weeks after that, we were dating each other.”
She credits her time in New York not only with meeting the love of her life, but with thickening her skin. “Everything that could happen to a person in the city happened to me, like getting mugged, and it made me tougher. It tested me, and how badly I wanted [a career in show biz],” she muses. While she pursued work in theater, she supported herself as an extra in movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and TV shows like BOARDWALK EMPIRE and GOSSIP GIRL. “I learned so much from those 14-hour days on set. I saw Leonardo DiCaprio work and Martin Scorsese and Ben Stiller, and I would study them. I had never taken any in-front-of-camera [acting] classes, but I learned all the different crew jobs and different lingo of being on set.”
Figuring there was more opportunity to land on camera work in L.A., and more than a little eager to ditch the hardship of New York winters, Dorken and Clark, by then her live-in boyfriend, made the move to California three years ago. “We had nobody here — no friends, no industry connections. It was just a roll of the dice and it was scary to say good-bye to the community and the connections I had made in New York, because I worked for those. But every step of the way I’ve just been reassured that I’m on the right path because things have just fallen into place. I accomplished more in a year in L.A. than I did in six years in Manhattan.”
One thing she did not do in L.A. was more extra work. “It just got too painful for me to be on a set and not be an actor with lines,” she explains. So, to support herself while she awaited her big break, “I worked as a brand ambassador for some different companies, freelance jobs, and literally, once I made enough to pay my bills, I would stop accepting jobs.” The rest of her time was spent taking classes, doing showcases, auditioning, and schmoozing her way through cocktail hours and meetings — “playing the game,” as she puts it — before signing on with the agent of her dreams. “I don’t want to say I got lucky, because I worked really hard, but once I met my agent, it definitely opened a lot of opportunities.”
GH, of course, being a key one. Her 2016 tryout for Amy was her first soap audition, “and I had to sing a cappella in front of the producers, which was a whole other level of nerves.” The show was looking not for a cookie-cutter (read: size 2) soap beauty, but one with pipes who could perform at the Nurses’ Ball. Dorken was thrilled to land the role (“I was super-flattered and honored”) and is proud to be playing a character who isn’t hung up on her figure. “I was really excited that that wasn’t the main plot of the character. A lot of the parts I go in for, it is a big topic of who they are, the storyline or why they act the way they do. It wasn’t in the breakdown [for Amy] that she was curvy or chubby or overweight or anything, and people like this exist in real life.
“I’m not going to say that I’m not aware of my shape and that I didn’t know until I saw myself on TV,” she continues. “I’m fully aware of it, and I think it’s crazy that it’s such a topic of discussion [among fans] because, you know, my co-stars get a lot of flak for being too small! No matter where you’re at, someone’s going to have a comment on it. I was always just like, ‘What matters is the acting, first of all, and second of all, on a personal level, how happy, how healthy are you? My doctor can vouch for the fact that I’m doing just fine.’ ” As one of the few fuller-figured females in the genre, “I’ve been put in the position of being a role model, and I’m happy to do that because I am genuinely a happy person. It stinks that it has to be a dialogue, but I’m happy to be that person.”
With GH expanding Nurse Amy’s screen time and life outside of work in recent months (“I finally got to wear jeans, not just scrubs!”), she’s quit her nonacting side gigs. “GH has been the focus right now and I’m so thankful to have a big, juicy storyline,” she enthuses. “And any time I have time off, I’m auditioning or writing my own stuff and shooting it with friends. If you snooze, there’s someone else who will pass you. You’ve gotta keep hustling! As soon as I reach one goal, I set another goal for myself. I’ll never settle. If I do, then it’s time to retire.”
The First Day Of The Rest Of Their Lives
On June 24, after seven years of happy cohabitation, Risa Dorken became Mrs. Bo Clark in a festive ceremony in upstate New York. “I worked really hard for two years planning it,” she reports. “There were a lot of snafus leading up to it, like a wedding planner who quit on us, but once we got there the week of the wedding, everything had been handled and organized, and it all went 100 percent amazing. We’d been to a lot of weddings that had a very heavy ceremony followed by a lot of tears. We wanted the whole day really to be a party. The tears that were shed were only because we were both so dang excited! For our first dance, we picked an up-tempo song [‘No Matter Where You Are’ by Us The Duo] and we just giggled and wiggled and kicked off the night with a dance party.”
Life back in L.A. as marrieds has been a blast. “I changed my name legally, not professionally, so now we are the Clarks,” she beams. “I didn’t think it was going to be a big deal, but signing your name at the grocery store, doing taxes, combining our car insurance, there are all these little reminders every day, like, ‘Oh, yeah, my life has changed. We’re a family!’ I really love it.”
Did You Know?
• To stave off the jitters of auditioning for GH Casting Director Mark Teschner, “This makes me sound kind of nutty, but I found footage of him talking [online] and watched it over and over again so I would get comfortable looking at him.”
• Her tearjerker wedding video (which fans can check out on her YouTube channel, youtube.com/risalouisedorken) was a surprise gift from one of the guests. “We didn’t get a videographer because I’m cheap and I spent all the money on food and everything,” she chuckles. “We didn’t have any idea he was doing it, but at one point someone noticed a drone [capturing footage]. We were like, ‘What?! Is it paparazzi?’ It was the best wedding gift ever.”
Just The Facts:
Birthday: February 4
Hometown: Apple Valley, MN
High Five: Dorken is the youngest of three children. “My sister is a real nurse in Texas, and my brother is a glass artist in Denver. We had a really goofy family, always acting out plays, but my parents had office jobs, not creative ones; my dad works for Delta and my mom works in export sales.”
Ear Buds: “I love ’90s pop and hip-hop,” Dorken enthuses. “Mariah Carey, Coolio, Prince, Beyoncé — happy music!”
Watch List: “I can’t live without Bravo or E!” the actress declares. “I watch all the reality stuff — HOLLYWOOD MEDIUM WITH TYLER HENRY, all the HOUSEWIVES, WATCH WHAT HAPPENS LIVE, BELOW DECK.”
Stay-In Power: “I live the life of, like, a 90-year-old woman,” the self-professed homebody says. “I love to craft, I love to garden. I’m growing my own herbs now because I have some outdoor space.”
On-The-Job Training: “My biggest mentors when I started at GH were Sonya [Eddy, Epiphany] and Marc [Anthony Samuel, Felix], from sharing scenes with them in the hospital and working on the Nurses’ Ball. I have so much respect for them.”
