Stirring The Pot
Soap Opera Digest: Congratulations on your pre-Emmy nomination.
Juliet Mills: It would be ironic if anyone was nominated now that we’ve been canceled. It’s very possible. People just might feel sorry for us. You never know, people might be a little more generous. Digest: What did you put on your reel?
Mills: A show that I did with Julian [Ben Masters]. Tabitha is in the kitchen with Endora and he comes and wants to talk about getting custody of her. Tabitha gets very upset and gruff. I find it very difficult finding reels, I must say. I don’t have normal scenes with people that much, so it’s hard. And I can’t remember back. All the scenes mesh into one in my mind. There was another episode that I liked that had a lot of flashbacks with Timmy, but the rest of it was hokey, a lot of Norma. That’s fun, but that’s not going to get you a Best Actress nomination. Digest: Nicole Cox [Endora] deserves accolades.
Mills: She’s an angel. I just love her. I shall stay friends with that family and watch her grow up. We’ve become very close. She’s my little friend. She’s going to be 4 in May and I met her when she was 4 weeks. We will definitely stay friends. She loves to come to the studio and come to “Tabba’s” house. She’s so good and very, very aware and very, very well-behaved. In the whole four years, we’ve only had about five times where she was crying or cranky where we would have to rewrite things and let her go home. Five times in four years is pretty amazing through teething and terrible twos. 
Digest: Where do you see yourself after PASSIONS comes to an end?
Mills: I don’t know what the future holds, but I hope to get back and do some work in the theater because that’s what I miss doing. We have an audience [on the soap], but we don’t [get immediate feedback]. I was doing a lot of comedy stuff today. You do it and it’s silent on the stage because it has to be. You don’t get any reactions, so you don’t really know how it has gone, especially if it’s comedy. There’s nothing like in the theater, getting a big belly laugh and you think, “That worked!”Digest: Will you move back to England?
Mills: No. Definitely not. I love to work in London in the theater, but I’m a Californian. I’m a U.S. citizen. I’ve lived here for 30 years. My kids live here and I feel like this is home. Especially now that both my parents have passed away, which was during PASSIONS’s run, so I feel even less that I would ever go back to live there. I’d love to do a sitcom or something. I feel that eight years on PASSIONS has been wonderful training for me. I’ve never had to learn so many lines, be so disciplined. The homework is the one thing that I won’t miss. Cramming lines when you have five or six shows a week [to tape] is really hard work. I love the process in the theater or other shows; you tend to have more rehearsal with other actors to work things out and plan things. That will be nice to do.Digest: Do you hope Tabitha is exposed as a witch before the end?
Mills: I don’t think so because she might be burned at the stake and I don’t want her to end up that way. I think she’ll probably go out with everyone thinking she’s an eccentric, old girl with this wonder, beautiful, golden-haired baby. Digest: Maybe she’ll fly off on a broomstick.
Mills: Maybe. I don’t know what they have planned. Maybe they don’t even know yet. We’re working through July, I believe, so we’ve got quite a few months to go. That’s good; it gives people time to get their plans lined up to do other things. It’s not like a nighttime series where it’s canceled and everybody is off the next week. It gives us all time to think about it. I’m sorry for the fans. We have so many devoted fans. Many of them have watched from the beginning. I get stopped all the time by all sorts of people, not just kids; grown-ups, guys, black women, gay men and children. Across the board, it’s extraordinary who watches it. The guy on Southwest Airlines came up to me and said, “I take my lunch at 2 o’clock so I can watch PASSIONS every day. It’s such fun and so entertaining.” I feel that we’ve let them down, but that’s TV for you.Digest: What surprises your fans when they see you?
Mills: They say, “You look younger off-screen!” I suppose it’s all that makeup and hair. They are very complimentary.
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