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Bond Girls: Abigail Klein (Stephanie) is grateful for the advice she got from Elia Cantu (Jada) when it came to playing DAYS’s Everett/Bobby reveal.
DAYS OF OUR LIVES’s Abigail Klein was excited to play out the twist of her character, Stephanie, discovering that she and her lifelong friend Jada had unwittingly been involved with the same man, Everett (or, as Jada knew him, Bobby). Enthuses Klein, “It’s nice to have a callback to that friendship, and then to share Everett, [which] neither of them know about for a while. It’s really fun. Jada is someone Stephanie really cares about. Then you throw a guy in the mix? You can only imagine how that will affect their friendship. Or will it?”
Klein admits it was easy bonding with Elia Cantu (Jada). “I adore her,” says Klein. “And I love working with her because she’s really smart. Elia works hard. She’s also fun and can be loose. I really appreciate that. She’s also really good at thinking of references for stuff that we’re shooting. She had asked me if I’d ever seen the movie Beaches and recommended that I watch it, so I did. That movie was a nice reference point for the material that we were experiencing on DAYS. I appreciated her recommending that, and it ended up being a really great movie to see in general.”
Klein immediately saw the similarities between Stephanie and Jada’s friendship and the one the lead characters CC and Hillary, played by Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey, respectively, shared in Beaches. “What happens when two friends go through a conflict, but yet they really care about each other? How does that work? How are their feelings hurt and how do they come back together?” rattles off Klein, noting that she and Cantu wanted to make sure “that we tried as best as we could to preserve and deepen how close our characters’ friendship was. That movie helped us sort of see it in essence. It helped as an example of what it could look like off the page.” That was particularly useful, Klein chuckles, given that “neither of us has had an ex-boyfriend who was in a coma, then came back, that we shared with a best friend.“ An outrageous turn like that one, she notes, “feels almost far away from you sometimes, when you read it [in a script]. But if you can concentrate on [Jada and Stephanie’s] relationship, everything else just falls into place. Elia helped bring that into the forefront, because I was getting lost in the circumstance of it all. Elia was like, ‘No, no, no. We can make this about their relationship. Then it doesn’t even matter what we’re saying.’ ”
Cantu’s words stuck with Klein. “It was like, ‘Yes. This is what we can do and how we can make it good,’ ” she says. “That [clarity is] what Elia gave me. She does it all the time! She’s just so great.”
