Catching Up With … Todd Rotondi (ex-Bryant Montgomery, ATWT, 2000-01)
In the seven years since he left ATWT, Todd Rotondi has kept busy: He appeared in a Dutch feature film and guest-starred on some TV shows in Holland (where ATWT is huge), made some independent films, joined a new band and most recently got cast in a new movie called The Heart Breaker. One thing he most certainly didn’t do was go missing —though Digest got a slew of letters of concern about him. In fact, Rotondi was the victim of a super-creepy, Blair Witch-style hoax — still referenced on his Internet Movie Database (IMDb) message board page — that suggested he’d been kidnapped. “I got a few calls saying, ‘Dude, there’s rumor going around that you’re missing.’ At first, I thought it was kind of funny. But then I read some stuff and thought it was a little disturbing,” says Rotondi. “I was a little freaked out, and it turned out to be a fan out in California who was an independent filmmaker. She went onto my IMDb page and started posting things about how I was dead. Someone got in touch with her legally and told her that she needed to cease what she was doing. We never heard anything after that.” 
Rotondi, who now lives mostly in Boston (near his hometown of Winchester, MA), has actually been focusing more on his music lately. Hoping to join a band as a singer, he put out feelers on Craigslist, but ended up coming across a group of musicians on his own. “They all grew up in Vermont together and had been playing together for 10, 12 years. I liked their music and they thought that the tone and quality of my vocals really fit their music and what they were going for,” he says about the birth of the band. The only thing left to do was figure out what to call themselves.
“We were having a tough time with the name. When I first met them, we went right to the studio and recorded the first album and we didn’t have a name, so it was like, what the hell are we going to put on this CD? We have to name it something. But it’s so hard to find a good name!” he laughs. “We were sitting at a bar one night brainstorming and we had a few drinks. We came up with some ridiculous names and then all of a sudden, it just came to me: Soap Stars. I was on soaps, so it would make sense, but the whole idea was to dress up like these vintage, 1970s soap stars. They loved it.”
That first CD became Songs For Housewives, and Soap Stars, whose sound Rotondi describes as alternative pop rock, will be touring soon. Rotondi urges fans to check out their music (and post their soap star costume ideas!) at www.myspace.com/soapstarsmusic. “You can order the CD or tracks there, and the stuff I’ve written will come out in March,” says Rotondi, who has been writing lyrics and recruited his friend, the internationally famous Dutch DJ Don Diablo, to produce a couple of tracks. “That will be the CD with ‘our’ sound; it’ll be the real Soap Star sound.”
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