GH’s Kirsten Storms On Zenon Franchise: ‘The Highlight Of My Acting Career’
Kirsten Storms is on the precipice of marking her 20th anniversary on General Hospital, a role she assumed on May 23, 2005 after a successful run on Days of Our Lives as Belle Brady. But it’s a project she shot before her daytime debut — the title role in the 1999 Disney Channel smash Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century — that not only put her on the map as an actress, but made such a big cultural impact that in a new interview with TV Insider, she called it “the highlight of my acting career.”
Girl Power
In her chat with the outlet, Storms recalled the rigorous audition process for the character of Zenon and revealed that after a multitude of callbacks, she and actress Allison Mack — the future Smallville star who served time for racketeering and racketeering conspiracy charges stemming from her involvement in NXIVM — were the two finalists under consideration, and the powers-that-be casting the project couldn’t come to an agreement. She explained, “The director [Kenneth Johnson] wanted Allison Mack, and the producers wanted me.”
Ultimately, of course, Storms did beat out Mack. As a guest on Dishing With Digest, the Soap Opera Digest podcast, in 2021, Storms recalled the life-changing moment that she found out she’d booked Zenon. “A few days after [the final callback], I was in the car with my best friend in high school, Kara, and my mom paged me on my pager,” she recounted. “Kara’s dad pulled over and let me use a payphone, which also don’t exist anymore [laughs], and I called my mom, because it was a ‘911’ page, and she was like, ‘You got the part, you got the part!’ It was really exciting.”
Storms elaborated, “I had no idea the success the movie was gonna have, or the travel I would get to experience from booking that role and the other work it would lead to. I was just really excited to take on that part and do my thing.”
On the podcast, Storms also shared her stand-out memories of filming the Zenon movies. “Spandex is, first and foremost, the biggest thing that I remember,” she chuckled. “It was a lot of work for me. I don’t think people think about that when talking to me about doing the movies. It was a group of kids [in the cast] and we were in some foreign place and everybody else got to explore and go see sights and take day trips and things like that, and I worked every day from morning till night. [I had] a lot of dialogue to remember.”
It’s an experience that helped prepare her for the demands of soaps — especially playing a character with the kind of rapid-fire dialogue scripted for Maxie. “I still take my days at work very seriously,” Storms said, “and I like to prepare my script in advance.”
At the time of its premiere, Zenon broke ratings records for the Disney Channel, and the movie ultimately became the first installment of a trilogy — the first Disney Channel flick ever to get a sequel, in fact. Zenon: The Zequel came out in 2001, and Zenon: Z3 followed in 2004. For millennials (and now for their daughters), Zenon was a major pop culture moment. “I never in a million years would have expected the reaction that movie got from people,” she admitted in her chat with TV Insider, adding, “It’s very cool and I’m very thankful for that.”
The first Zenon came out in January 1999, and Storms made her first appearance on DAYS that August. And it turns out, that might not have happened had it not been for the reaction Zenon sparked in its young viewers. Storms shared on the podcast, “Ken Corday [DAYS Executive Producer], his kids, if I’m remembering this correctly, saw Zenon and liked it,” and as a result, “I didn’t really have to audition for the part.”
Summer Lovin’: Not long after starring in Zenon, Storms was in a hit DAYS pairing with Jason Cook as Belle and Shawn.
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