Soap Opera Digest: You seem to be having a ball exploring the darker side of your white-knight persona.
Ingo Rademacher: This is probably one of the best stories that I've had in the nine years, almost 10 that I've been here. It's really been exciting.

Digest: What has the fan response been like?
Rademacher: Most of the responses that I'm getting are, "Don't break up Liz and Lucky [laughs]," which is good because it's creating a lot of tension. They have said, "Oh, you're so mean to [Courtney]," and it's like, "Well, he does have a reason to be," so I try to play the truth in the situation there.

Digest: But he has said some nasty things, like when Jax caught Courtney coming home after spending the night with Nikolas.
Rademacher: [laughs]: All that stuff was good: "I wasn't asking if it was good sex, sweetie. I was wondering if you cared about all the people that you walked over." I wrote that! It's been really good working with Becky [Herbst, Elizabeth] in that storyline, too.

Digest: We've heard interest from some fans about a Jax and Alexis re-pairing.
Rademacher: There was never a pairing there, just a marriage [laughs]. But they were never like a couple. Although working with Nancy [Lee Grahn] is always fun.

Digest: You surprised a lot of people with your great singing voice on SOAP TALK. Did you ever want to pursue music as a career?
Rademacher: It's one of those things that if you really wanted to get into it, it's a lot of work. I don't want to go touring around. I really have no interest in doing that. I like writing songs. My music partner, Gunner, and I will probably record some stuff or maybe even do an album, a self-published album, and maybe put something on the Web site. The two songs I performed I just wrote literally two weeks before. We came up with "Imagination Wanders" and "Come to Paradise," which I thought was appropriate for Hawaii. That's based on me wanting to spend more time [in the Aloha state].

Digest: We noticed you used cue cards when you sang on the show.
Rademacher: I did have to write down the second part on one of the songs. The second verse is always slipping out of my head.

Digest: Occupational hazard for actors having to learn and release all that dialogue?
Rademacher: Exactly!