The Joke’s on Sean Kanan!
“I was in Italy twice over a month and a half,” says Kanan, who can now carry a convo in the local language. “I went to Florence, Rome and Milan and then I went to Sardinia for a week. My parents met me in Rome and we went to Florence for my mother’s birthday. Then I came back and worked [at B&B] for a month and went back to Milan to do some more work.”
That work he’s been up to in Milan is modeling for the likes of Brooks Brothers and Carlo Pignatelli. “It’s just an excuse to go to Italy and have a good time,” he says of the modeling, noting there are other gigs in the works. “It was fun rolling over there like Elvis for a couple of weeks. THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL is the No. 1 show there and the Italian fans are really ravenous when it comes to their TV personalities. They just get into it. People are a lot more blasè in the United States, especially in L.A. Italy’s beautiful, it’s fun and I definitely am a little spoiled and get special treatment over there, But who wouldn’t like that?”
One of the highlights of his trip, however, was actually a bit of mistreatment. “I wound up doing a TV show in Sardinia called ‘Che Parte,’ which means, ‘The Jokes on You,'” Kanan shares. “They gave me a rough outline of what it was going to be and said, ‘Just roll with it.’ It was all ad lib and it was really funny.”
The Italian comedy, which is a bit like MTV’s PUNK’D, set Kanan up to take a major fall in a very public place. “In a nutshell, I’m on a speedboat being taken out to a bigger boat for an interview,” Kanan sets up. “The two guys on the speedboat, the captain and first mate, say, ‘Can we get a picture of you behind the steering wheel for my girlfriend.’ Then, they start driving and all of the sudden the boat loses control and it feels like we hit something.
“We get back into the port and there are 500 people there,” he continues. “Two cops walk up and say, ‘Excuse me, a boat fitting this description just ran over a scuba diver, crushed his head and killed him.'”
After questioning the captain, the cops turned on Kanan. “I was like, ‘I’m not saying anything until I go to the consulate or talk to an attorney.’ The cop slaps me in the face and says, ‘This isn’t America!’ I didn’t expect him to hit me. It was a good shot, but you don’t break character, so I go with it. I stand up and as I stand, he opens his gun, so I sit back down like, ‘This is bull****.'”
To make matter worse, the crew points the finger at him, showing that photo they snapped of Kanan behind the wheel. “The guy leans over to me and says, ‘Bastard, look what you did!'” Kanan recalls. “Then another boat comes in with a woman crying, saying I ran over her husband. Then a journalist comes and I say, ‘I’m not talking to you!’ He says, ‘Maybe I can help you,’ so I explain what happened. He says, ‘Hold on…American actor from BEAUTIFUL runs over scuba diver. Kills him dead!’ Then this girl runs up and asks for an autograph. The cops throw her in the water. They tell me, ‘The magistrate’s coming and you’re going to jail.'”
Meanwhile, the marina is overflowing with voyeurs. “They didn’t know what was going on,” he laughs. “They recognized me and were horrified. Then another boat comes in and you see this sheet with fins poking out. The cop says, ‘Go look at what you did!’ I pull the thing back and this guy jumps out and yells, basically, ‘Surprise!'”
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