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The character’s manner, however, is based on someone more specific. “I modeled him more after an Athenian gentleman that my father knew that was very erudite and quite free with his opinions,” explains Kapelos. “He was a lovely guy, but a lot of these Greek guys tend to want to pontificate a bit. I found him to be a little bit like that. And my father was like that too. My father was a bit of a teacher type.”
Hence, Kapelos’s take on Konstantin “was sort of within me,” he notes. “It was fun to let the accent flower, for the most part. I haven’t been able to do that before. I mean, I had a small stint in the movie The Shape of Water where I played an Armenian gentleman and had a slightly different accent. But it’s tough because you don’t want to make it too heavy so that people don’t understand what you’re saying. That’s really the trick of doing a good accent, because if it gets too mumbly, then you lose the point of doing it. And, as you can see, Konstantin is quite articulate. He doesn’t suffer fools lightly and he doesn’t really speak like a fool, although he sometimes acts like one,” Kapelos adds with a chuckle.
When Kapelos began his run on DAYS, not everyone on the show knew his Greek accent was fake. “A lot of crew people and some actors were surprised because I would just speak like that on the set and then go back to my dressing room. But during rehearsal, occasionally, I would break [from it]. I’ve worked with actors like Hugh Laurie on HOUSE, who would only speak in American and would never speak in an English accent [on set]. I don’t do that. I can break.”
