Favorite Thing About Kate? “I love her lust for life and that she is her own authentic self. She doesn’t care what other people think. She lives her own authentic life. She has that freedom of being an outsider. She was an outsider for so long that now, it doesn’t matter to her. That frees her up to do what she wants to do. She’s definitely someone who wants to break through that glass ceiling completely. That’s what it’s about and she doesn’t care. She doesn’t have time for the pettiness that might have preoccupied her earlier in her life. That’s gone now, and there’s power in that.”
Favorite Thing About Playing Kate? “Probably all of the things I just named. It’s really fun to play a character that is free and speaks her mind. I was just in an extraordinarily confrontational scene, and she doesn’t give two you-know-whats. She really doesn’t. Even when it comes to somebody threatening her life, she’s still going to speak her truth. Not to say that she isn’t a great manipulator, because she is. That’s so much fun to play, too. Kate has a lot of emotional depth. And for me, I can always go back to that she’s suffered a lot and had a lot of pain in her life, and she’s grown from it and learned from it. It’s always there. It’s kind of a lesson, too. It’s that you have to move beyond. It may be there, but you have to move beyond, although maybe you can use it at times in part of your life. It’s part of your journey.”
Favorite Mother/Child Scene? “I’ve had a lot of great scenes, because I have a lot of children. I hate to play favorites but I’m going to mention one because I saw it most recently. It was a scene between Philip and Kate back when she had tried to kill Daniel. She got caught and Stefano was blackmailing her into marrying him. She’d already broken the news to Victor, and Philip comes to her and begs her not to do it. He tells her she has mental problems and needs to get help. It was a great scene and Jay [Kenneth Johnson, ex-Philip] was so fantastic in it. It was really a breaking point, too, because Kate’s children had always been her everything. Philip was begging her to accept responsibility and get help, but she just said, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t go to a mental hospital. I’ll really go crazy.’ So she kind of broke the bond with him at that point. It was a very emotional scene, and I just remember Jay being wonderful. It really was kind of the crux of her relationship with him and really all her children. They are everything to her, but her life was on the line there, or so she felt.”
Favorite Wedding? “My favorite wedding was, of course, the ‘blood wedding’, as I like to call it. From an actor’s point of view, it was really great, although it wasn’t so great for Roman or Kate. They had gotten married and then Roman went off. He got called away. Kate went looking for him and found him stabbed with a sword. It reminded me of when I first started out in theater and I did a lot of Shakespeare. So I really pulled from my theatrical experience, making my entrance through the flower-strewn archway with blood dripping. I remember they had to pour ‘blood’ into my palms. I cupped them, so I could walk in drenched in blood. It was my very own little horror movie. It was the challenge of doing all that that makes it my favorite wedding. I really liked the wedding to Stefano, too, but in a different way. It was just Stefano, Victor and Kate. Victor was the best man. Theo was there, too. It was so wicked. There was so much subtext going on. Those were really good scenes.”
Favorite Memory Of Joseph Mascolo (ex-Stefano)? “There are so many of them. I loved working with him. I miss him to this day. I was working on the DiMera set today. His portrait is up there. I feel like I always greet him when I go onto that set. One of my favorite things is we had discussed Mr. and Mrs. DiMera quite a bit. Joe had a lot of ideas about that. In the beginning, I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ as he was telling me who Mrs. DiMera was. What he was really doing was relating Stefano DiMera’s life and what it meant to be a DiMera. There were really wonderful bits of information as we created that bond. Bo and Hope would come into the room and we would form this impenetrable wall. You didn’t let anything or anyone affect you. I’m not saying Kate really did that, but it was really interesting to learn his whole process and who Stefano was. The more we worked together, the more we became that couple. That’s what forged that real bond. It was like, ‘Okay, she is Kate DiMera, and Kate DiMera is different from Kate Roberts.’ Kate learned from Stefano and I picked up a lot of interesting tidbits from Joe. He was very open. He loved the work. He was so passionate about it. I have to say that I loved working with him all the time.”
Favorite Secret From Kate’s Past? “The one that I liked the best is the fact that Kate had had a past association with Stefano, working as a call girl, although she wasn’t exactly on the sidewalk. So much came out of that. That’s why it’s my favorite secret, and it was a huge one. That was a huge storyline with Sami, too, because she found out about all that and went on to reveal it. It’s the secret that really ended up changing her life the most, when she was outed. You realized that she’d had these other lives, she was streetwise, and she had a lot of grit. She didn’t just have this fancy life. She didn’t grow up that way, necessarily, but then we don’t really know where she came from. I’ve had a lot of thoughts about that. I think she had a lot of ups and downs. My theory used to be that she actually ran away from home and that’s why she ended up where she did. I feel like there was some kind of abusive relationship in her family.”
Favorite Fight With Vivian? “That’s a tough one. I guess I could say the latest one we had about a year ago where I shot her; just the specifics of that one. In some ways, these two people were having the same argument they’ve always had. A powerful struggle, of course. But the fact that they actually had Kate shoot her? We went to that extra place. And the fact that Kate got taunted into doing it was shocking. Things went further than they had ever gone before. Louise [Sorel, ex-Vivian] is another person who I just love working with all of the time. We had such fun. There’s also another scene from way back, when Kate came back from this desert island. She worked her way back from being out on this fishing boat. She was a mess. She got all the way back to the Kiriakis mansion, went up to the bedroom, and who’s there but Vivian. She and Victor were ready to consummate their marriage or whatever. Kate came in like the third wheel. That started Kate and Vivian’s whole, huge rivalry that went on forever.”
Favorite Outtake? “Typically, especially back in the day, I had a lot of dramatic exits. After a huge argument with Sami, where we were yelling and screaming, I’d get the upper hand and go to flounce out of the room. I’d grab the doorknob, and the door wouldn’t open. Then I’d try again, and it would become a total joke because this big, dramatic scene was totally destroyed. I started to have, and I think Ali [Sweeney, ex-Sami] did, too, a little bit of a phobia about it. Like, ‘Oh, my God. I’m going to the door. That thing better open.’ I have an outtake that’s worse. It was when John and Kate were first kind of flirting with each other. We had a scene in Kate’s office. I think she was working at Basic Black. I was sitting down, and Kate was kind of being semi-seductive with him. I think I reached for something. I had this great suit on with this blouse, and it just burst open. I was like, ‘What?’ It wasn’t what I had planned to do at all. We couldn’t keep that. That had gone too far. There’s flirting, and then there’s full exposure. We had to redo the scene.”
Favorite Outfit? “It’s normally the gowns. I really loved the gown I wore a while ago. It was when we were in Italy. Kate was there, Lucas was playing a surfer, and the Moroni character was there. Kate stayed at this grand Italian villa. [Costume Designer] Richard Bloore had found this fabulous gown. It was a purplish eggplant color with a very tight corset, tight at the bodice. It came out into a huge skirt and almost had a bustle in back, with a long train. We didn’t really have a formal event to wear it to. I said, ‘I think if Kate’s in Italy and in this villa, she would just wear this gown.’ And I did. We talked the producer into it. It was just fabulous, and I felt fabulous in it. Moroni was very impressed because Kate was playing this grand lady.”
Favorite On-Screen Moment Or Storyline? “I really loved my time working with Joe. It was very challenging and rewarding. My most favorite recent storyline was working with A Martinez [ex-Eduardo]. He is absolutely so in the moment. Even though we didn’t work together very long, it was blissful working with him. I thought our characters connected immediately. There was so much storyline that could have been told there. I think we just touched the tip of the iceberg with that.”
Favorite On-Screen Relationship? “For sure the Sami and Kate relationship. I loved working with Ali. I loved that they allowed that story arc to grow. We went through so much. We were archenemies. You think of all the things we did to each other, and then we ended up working together and bonding. Now Kate does think of Sami as her daughter. There’s this closeness that developed and a respect for each other that is amazing. And that developed over some 15 years.”
Favorite Job? “I’ve liked it every time Kate was the head of a company. Every time she’s boss, that’s been a good career move. I love when she’s working, and I get the best response from the audience. Everyone enjoys that, especially where we are now with the women’s movement. I think it’s so important when she’s the boss and she’s in control. I love it when we have corporate setups and we’re in the office or in the boardroom.”
