Sheridan in Distress
This month it will be five years since Sheridan’s life tragically paralleled her best friend, Princess Diana, on PASSIONS. Ever since she crashed her car into the same Parisian tunnel where Diana died, Sheridan has been a perpetual damsel-in-distress, felled by one calamity after another. Among all of them, Sheridan’s portrayer, McKenzie Westmore, has her personal favorite: The psych ward. Everybody thinks I am nuts anyway, so…” she says laughing.
“But seriously,” Westmore continues. “I had such a great time doing that, because it was the first time I really went forward and did research. I watched movies, like Girl Interrupted and One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. I interviewed people. I actually interviewed my mother, who was a psych major. She had worked in a psych ward where she saw some of this go on and what happens to people after they have been through this kind of treatment. I then watched A Beautiful Mind when it got to the shock therapy. Through all of this, it really helped me to get to a different place with the character — that is why you saw me climbing from walls and drool coming from my mouth. And it was so much fun to not care about being pretty!”
“I remember doing this one scene in the psych ward with Alistair, where he is petting my head and he grabbed my hair,” continues Westmore. “[Alistair’s body double] and I worked this out together. He started to grab it, and I said, ‘Grab it harder. Make it mean. Let’s make this a sick, twisted father/daughter thing,’ because that is how Alistair and Sheridan truly are: There is something sick and twisted between these two characters. So he really grabbed my hair, and I was like, ‘Owwwww’ in Sheridan’s drugged-up stupor. And a lot of people thought I was really being shocked. I even had fan mail come through that asked, ‘Are you hooked up to something? Are you really being tortured? We want to make sure you’re okay!'”
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