Disney/Eric McCandless
Prepare Yourself: Kin Shriner has a different method for memorization than co-star Lynn Herring (Lucy).
Kin Shriner‘s (Scott, GENERAL HOSPITAL) famously loose acting style is a stark counterpoint to that favored by the two women he’s been working with most closely of late, Jane Elliot (Tracy) and Lynn Herring (Lucy). “I get a kick out of both those girls,” he says fondly. “With Jane, I’ll say, ‘Hey, you wanna run the lines?’ and I’m going through the pages, and she’s very organized with her scripts in a binder. I had a bunch of pages and some of the pages I wasn’t in [the scenes for] and she was like, ‘Have you even looked at the script?! What are all those pages?’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s the way it comes from the printer,’ and, ‘Don’t you worry, Jane! Don’t worry, we’ll be fine once we get up there!’ Both these girls are worrywarts! I mean, they forget that, you know, 47 years of me doing this guy, he’ll spring into action! But sometimes they of little faith [laughs]. I have to prove them both wrong! Lynn has her scripts broken down into scenes. She’ll have six or seven little pages and I’ll go, ‘Why don’t you just have the full script?!’ She’ll say, ‘This is my system!’ So, she’s meticulous in her own way. They’re both meticulous about it so when they look at my script and see, ‘Well, there’s coffee, there’s red wine, that looks like food, there’s stuff all over this script!’ And I go, ‘Well, yeah, there could be….’ “But there’s a method to Shriner’s madness, he insists. “Most of the people are trying to decipher what’s written and deliver it the way they think it should be said. I, on the other hand, try to find somewhere to go where it’s a little more comedic, funny, maybe using words that aren’t particularly in the script. I don’t think Jane has any issues with that. She doesn’t really care. If I say, ‘Lucy’s cooking up something,’ she’ll say, ‘That’s fine, I was supposed to say ‘cooking up something’ but I guess I can say ‘cooking up something’, too. So, she goes along with it. She’s just very organized and when I appear to have just pages and pages of dialogue that are unorganized, that makes her a little crazy. There was a time back in the day — I wouldn’t do it today or she’d kill me — where I took her folders and I put Tuesday’s script where Wednesday’s was and Wednesday’s where Tuesday’s was, and she laughed and thought it was funny because she’s so meticulous about her binder and her lines for the day. I just have pages wadded up in my pocket that I can refer to. I don’t really look at [my script as much as they do]. Trish [Ramish, GH’s Trish, his girlfriend] will say, ‘You haven’t even looked at your lines for tomorrow yet.’ I say, ‘No, no, no, they come to me.’ I’ve been getting away with it because I’ve been doing it for so long. I say to people, ‘It’s like the guy who goes to the gym and does bicep curls. The memory is a muscle and if you work it all the time, it’s going to be there.’ So I don’t concern myself as much as I maybe should [about committing my dialogue to memory]. I figure that it’ll come to me when the cameras roll. Something will come to me — and it will work!”
