Howard Wise/jpistudios.com
When Lisa Yamada first joined B&B as Luna last year, she had her fair share of nerves, especially when it came to retaining the mass amount of dialogue required of actors in the soap world. “They totally hazed me my second week on set,” she recalls with a laugh. “They literally gave me, like, 45 pages of dialogue in one day and I was going to cry. The night before, I was like, ‘I can’t do this! I don’t know, they think too much of me. There’s no way I can do this!’ ” But just when she needed it most, she got a boost of confidence from the show’s patriarch, John McCook (Eric). “I’ll never forget this,” Yamada says. “John McCook told me, ‘Just take it one scene at a time. You don’t have to memorize all of it. Just know it and take your time with it and if you need [more] time, they’ll be okay with it, they’ll give you the time that you need.’ And that day, I killed it! 45 pages of dialogue! I was in [the studio working] from the beginning of the day until the end of the day. I was so exhausted, but it was so much fun! And after I got that over with, I was like, ‘Okay, if I can do that, I can do anything!’ And even though I did feel like I was being hazed, honestly, it was for the best because now whenever I see that I have a ton of scenes to do on one day, I’m like, ‘Okay, I’ve done it before and I can do it again.’ ”
The actress says she’s also learned invaluable lessons from watching the way her castmates handle their own workload. “On my first day, I saw a couple of scenes that Annika [Noelle, Hope] and Matt [Atkinson, Thomas] did, because their scenes were right before mine. I was watching them on the monitor and that’s when I was like, ‘Oh, wow, I’m in a room full of, like, crazy professionals!’ I mean, they are made for this. They are so talented and they can pick up direction and lines so quickly, and I just admired from from the jump and I learned a lot from just watching them. I’ve learned so much from the people who have been on the show for so many years.” That extends to B&B’s off-camera personnel. “Our stage managers were so welcoming my first week as well,” Yamada praises. “And even though they didn’t necessarily teach me how to act in this space, they made me comfortable enough that I could let my guard down and do what I need to do. The whole production was really sweet about me being new to the soap world. They didn’t just throw me in with the wolves! Even before my first day, one of the producers showed me around the set and explained how everything works and where my dressing room was going to be and how hair and makeup would go. They just broke it all down, from the top of the day to the end of the day, so I had an expectation of how the day was going to go. It was so great to get a welcome like that.”
