Exclusive: Ros Gentle Speaks Out On End Of ‘Exhilarating’ DAYS Run, Possible Return
Away She Goes: Ros Gentle on the DAYS set with Dan Feuerriegel (EJ).
Ros Gentle has completed her run as Rachel Blake, aka the Woman in White. After threatening to testify against EJ, he made her disappear on the Friday, March 21 episode, which could be the end of the line for Rachel… or not.
Never Say Never
“As you know, in any soap, every door is always open no matter what,” delivers Gentle with a laugh. “They’ll reincarnate me. The door was nailed shut before, right? [Rachel] was killed or so they thought 25 years ago or something.”
Should Rachel get another lease on life, Gentle would totally welcome a return trip to DAYS. “Absolutely, yeah,” she says. “I’d love to return. I want to know what’s happened to me, because it was not clear when I left. I can’t say too much. I’m waiting to see what happens after a while.”
Gentle had a wonderful run in Salem. “It was lovely. It was hectic and crazy and exciting and driven. It was a really exhilarating experience for an actor, because you’ve got to commit so strongly straight away,” explains Gentle. “Usually an actor will sort of go in, do a little rehearsal, then try [a scene] sort of full on, and then do it really full on. Well, you have to go from 0 to 80 in soaps. There’s no graduation. There’s no moving up to 30 miles an hour, then 50, 60, 70, 80… You have to go from zero to 80 right away. But even if you don’t remember the lines exactly, you’ve just got to know the context. Because even if you get the context with different words, they’ll pass it. They’ll let it go through. They’ve got someone, the script supervisor, and they will go, ‘yay’ or ‘nay.’ So there’s a little bit of improv in there, too.”
Gentle also enthuses that DAYS “was one of the most welcoming sets I’ve ever been on; everybody from hair and makeup to all the people I worked with,” she recalls. “I really only worked with Tamara [Braun, Ava], Stacy [Haiduk, Kristen], Dan [Feuerriegel, EJ], Galen [Gering, Rafe] and the little girl [Finley Rose Slater, who plays Rachel]. I didn’t work with everyone, but I got a sense of everyone in the makeup room. That’s where you kind of meet and chat, when you’re getting your makeup done. Everyone was really friendly and really lovely.”
The only real challenge Gentle faced was making sure she had all her dialogue down before she stepped foot on set. “The thing that I had to do was go home and learn eight scenes, then get [to the studio] an hour before my call time to run those lines with the dialogue coach,” recounts Gentle. “That was an experience learning eight scenes every night for the next day. That wasn’t the fun part, but everyone was really good. Even when the dialogue coach was done and I’d seen her already, I could easily walk into Stacy or Dan’s room and say, ‘Let’s run these lines.’ Everyone was really good about running lines, because once you got on that set it was one take. That’s it.”
As for the most memorable moments from her tenure as Rachel, Gentle cites a pair of physical scenes. “We had to do the scene where she stabs [Ava] several times,” notes Gentle. “And that early scene, where she hit Ava over the head… We had to do that about a half-dozen times. Nobody could really find a way to make it work. We had two directors. The first director tried. Every time we tried [to shoot it], it just didn’t work no matter what angle they took. The only camera that could get it would be the one from the front, and it just wasn’t working. Then the second director came in. It was sort of the cliffhanger, so it had to be done again. He tried a different technique, but he couldn’t get it to work either. So they had to jump-cut the scene,” adds Gentle, referring to an editing technique that makes an action appear to leap forward in time. “Anyway, it is what it is.”
Captive Audience: Gentle’s Rachel with Tamara Braun’s Ava.
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