Exclusive: Ros Gentle Was Happy to Find Another Aussie on the DAYS Set
Common Bond: DAYS’s Ros Gentle (Rachel) and Dan Feuerriegel (EJ) are both natives of Australia.
Ros Gentle, who plays the Lady in White/Rachel Blake on Days of our Lives, was pleasantly surprised when she arrived at the soap’s Burbank studio and found fellow Aussie Dan Feuerriegel (EJ) among her new co-stars.
Meet Cute
“We met in the hallway and I said, ‘There’s another Aussie,’ ” recounts Gentle. “We just laughed and he said, ‘Yes, but I do a British accent.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m doing an American accent!’ It was just one of those silly moments.”
According to Gentle, that has happened quite frequently during her tenure working in the States. “It’s always nice to find an Aussie on set — and it’s not unusual to find an Aussie on set, either in front of the camera or behind the camera,” she notes. “I wouldn’t say it happens in everything, but in a good 40 to 50 percent of the things I’ve done, I’ve found an Aussie on the set somewhere.”
Unfortunately, Gentle didn’t get much time to really get to know or share stories about their homeland with Feuerriegel. “I only had maybe two or three scenes with him, so I didn’t get to see him a lot,” says Gentle. “And the scenes go so fast at DAYS. You don’t have a lot of time to chat. It was just a reminder to me and gave me a renewed respect for soap actors again, because I started in soaps in Australia.”
Over the years, Gentle has had to don an American accent for many of her characters, but despite the practice she’s gotten, she doesn’t feel she’s ever mastered one. “I wouldn’t ever call myself a pro at it,” she contends. “I’m still very self-conscious about my not accurate American accent, because I know you guys are judging. You know your accents, so I’m terrified that someone is going to pick it up.”
There have been no complaints at DAYS. “It was funny, because Marnie [Saitta, casting director] came to set one day, which was lovely,” recalls Gentle. “I said to her, ‘I wasn’t sure if you were going to [hire] me, because I thought my accent would have been terrible.’ And she said, ‘No, no. I like the slight British [accent], because [Rachel] spent so long in Paris.’ That made me not feel so bad about if my accent was accurate or not.”
Gentle notes that the tricks and techniques for getting an American accent down only work in part. “There are always a few words or phrases that are difficult,” she says. “I can’t think of one right now to give you an example, but there’s always something that you have to just drill yourself. Like you really have to work around the ‘r’ sounds. If there are two in a row, that’s a little tricky.”
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