Already have an account?
Get back to the

Special Feature!

Hire Education

"The Bold and the Beautiful" Set
Anthony Turpel "The Bold and the Beautiful" Set CBS Television City Los Angeles, Ca. 06/5/17 © John Paschal/jpistudios.com 310-657-9661 Credit: JPI

An actress for most of her young life, Alyvia Alyn Lind (Faith, Y&R) has spent a lot of time going to school while on the job. “When I work, I’m constantly going back-and-forth from school to set, and that gets kind of complicated,” she admits. “Sometimes, they’ll call me back to set in the middle of a test. But I really do like it; I never get bored because I’m constantly moving!”
Lind says she enjoys projects where she finds herself in a group setting. “I love working on jobs where there are other kids because then we all sit in the classroom and do school together, but it’s also great when I have the teacher all to myself,” she smiles. “I get school done so much quicker and then we play games to pass the time.”

Haley Pullos (Molly, GH) was also young when she broke into the biz, and is all too familiar with going to class at work. “I started acting when I was 8 and I started at GH when I was 10 and those are kind of prime school years,” she notes. “I went to a school for actors, so I was able to miss a lot and I would go to school on set at GH with our teacher, Miss Leslie. And I hated it; it was awful. Legally, we had to do three hours a day, no matter what, and I didn’t always have three hours of work to do, so she’d be like, ‘Make something up [laughs]!’ It was really boring! A lot of the time, I would just draw, because sometimes I really didn’t have schoolwork to do, but I wasn’t allowed to leave.”

JPI

How the three required hours were structured depended on the day. “For minors, they can only work a certain number of hours, and those hours have to include the three hours of school, whether it’s before you start filming or during a break,” Pullos explains. “I think I could only work six hours at a time, and had to do those three hours of school, and sometimes I would only have one scene and then would have to do three hours of school. It sucked! It’s three hours over the course of the day, but sometimes they would call me in early if they knew it was going to be a long day, so I would have those three hours first thing in the morning. They were really good about scheduling around it.”

Often, the attention Pullos got from the teacher was one-on-one. “Usually, I was alone in the schoolroom,” she recalls. “When I first started, Lexi [Ainsworth, Kristina] was still in high school, so every now and then, she would be in school with me. But she always hid in the hair and makeup room and Miss Leslie would literally make me go find her and drag her back into the schoolroom. I’d be like, ‘No, don’t make me come back!’ ”

Tracey E. Bregman logged time in studio school as a teenager while playing Donna on DAYS, and also got individual attention. “Martha Nix [ex-Janice] and Natasha Ryan [ex-Hope] were also on the show but they were younger than me, so we each had our own studio teacher,” she explains. “I had the best teacher, who I had to share with Jodie Foster. I always got so mad whenever Jodie was doing a movie because my teacher would be gone, but, in all, I had three teachers that were amazing.”
However, she feels the three hours of required schooling would ultimately reflect in her work. “I was doing 40 pages of dialogue and going to the school on set at the same time,” she recalls. “Back then, we would have camera blocking in the morning, then we’d have lunch and come back to dress rehearsal. After that, we’d finally tape, so it was a full day. The other actors were able to study and learn their blocking, but I was in school and I had a couple of directors who didn’t understand why I wasn’t perfect with camera blocking. It was a pain.”

Getty

When she wasn’t working at her soap job, Bregman would attend a private academy, but her on set teacher received the same curriculum in order for the actress to keep up with her peers. Still, her schedule was grueling. “It was really hard,” she sighs. “I was doing schoolwork, homework, learning lines and going to acting classes, plus taking dance classes on Tuesday and Thursday nights and all day Saturday. If I didn’t love acting as much as I did, I would’ve said, ‘Forget it!’ I don’t know how I did it. I’m not sure if I can work and go to the market in the same day now [laughs].”

Pullos spent six years in the GH schoolroom, then graduated early. “I took the CHSPE, the California High School Proficiency Exam, when I was 16,” she explains, “so I legally graduated from high school and didn’t have to do it at work anymore. I did finish high school for real, I just didn’t have to go to classes at work. That makes you legally 18 in the workplace and so for most of high school, I didn’t have to go to school on set.”

B&B’s Anthony Turpel (R.J.) is currently the only actor in his cast who is still in school. “The school- room at CBS is way back in a part of the building that no one ever goes to,” he shares. “You need a map to find it.” Turpel says that he has worked with the same teacher since he left regular school full-time several years back. “I have been doing school this way for the past few years now and my teacher, Miss Ginger, has been my teacher during that time, which I think is a really good thing,” he relays. “She knows my strengths and weaknesses and what I need to work on. We know each other’s rhythms.”

JPI

While Turpel admits that he does miss some of the social aspects of traditional schooling, “I do get to see some of my friends when I go in to meet with my teacher,” he notes. “Plus, there are a lot of cool things about doing it this way. I don’t ever have to worry about bullying or dressing up to impress anybody. I don’t even have to comb my hair if I don’t want to [laughs].”

Lind doesn’t feel like she’s losing out on anything. “After work and on weekends, I have a lot of friends I hang out with, so I don’t really miss being with other kids. And actually, being on set with Josh [Morrow, Nick] is kind of like being on set with a kid because we joke around so much!”

Knowing what GH’s current crop of student youngsters, including Eden McCoy (Josslyn) and Scarlett Fernandez (Charlotte), are going through, Pullos makes it a point to visit them in the school room. “I always go in and I’m like, ‘Guys, I am so sorry that you have to do this.’ And they try to get me to stay for as long as possible, but I don’t want to distract them. But I’m like, ‘I get it!’ Sometimes I’ll color with them and stuff. When Jimmy [Deshler, ex-Rafe] and I were on the show together, he had already graduated, and I always used to make him sit in the schoolroom with me and just watch me read or whatever. But listen, even though it wasn’t my favorite thing to do, I did take school seriously. It is really nice to be able to do work and school together, because even though I did have my profession, school is really important and I understood that it was a big deal to learn the basics of being a human being! As boring as it was, it really did shape me as a person, and I think about it all the time. When I’m at work, I always walk past that little room in the hallway and I do have fond memories of it — now that I get to leave when I want to if I go in there [laughs]!”

Parent’s Association
Alyvia Alyn Lind’s mother, Barbara Alyn Woods (ex-Deb, ONE TREE HILL), believes her daughter is receiving a solid education. “When Alyvia works, she usually has a tutor who is strictly focused on her and her schoolwork,” says Mom. “I actually feel that she gets more accomplished and learns more while she’s working than when she has time off. Aly has always tested ahead of her grade level and is planning to combine 5th and 6th grade into one year. It’s incredible what the quantity and quality of her workload is when she has three hours of relatively undivided tutor time.”

Attending studio school is a family tradition, Woods shares. “My oldest daughter graduated from high school two years early because she had always been home-schooled or had school on set, and my middle daughter is about to do the same. I’m a big fan of one-on-one learning and feel so fortunate to have worked with such qualified and enthusiastic California studio teachers.”

JPI

Comments