Hunter King (Summer, Y&R) relies on Michael Mealor (Kyle) to give her a lift — sometimes literally. “I’m always falling on set so it was inevitable that I would do it with Michael,” admits the actress. “While we were shooting a scene, I somehow rolled my ankle and I couldn’t really put a lot of weight on my foot. I was also wearing heels, which made the situation a little tricky.” Because King and Mealor can read each other so well, he realized something was off. “I don’t know how he knew I was in some kind of trouble, but Michael luckily saved the day,” King marvels. “We had to kiss and then back up, so without me saying anything, he was able to grab me, pick me up a little and walk me back. It was so effortless with him. I watched that scene later and you couldn’t even tell what he did. I can be such a klutz. There are times when we’re supposed to kiss on the lips and I land on his cheek instead. Once, we were still shooting, and I quietly whispered to him. ‘Oh, my God. Do you think they can tell I just kissed your cheek?’ I watched it again and I don’t think anyone could read my lips to know what I was saying.”
After more than a decade of playing B&B’s Steffy/Liam/Hope love triangle, Jacqueline MacInnes Wood (Steffy) is adjusting to life without her scene partner Scott Clifton (Liam). “I love Scott and I love working with him, but for Steffy to finally get a real love interest that she’s not sharing with someone else? That’s really exciting,” enthuses Wood. “Obviously, I don’t ignore the fans. We’ve got great ‘Steam’ fans and great ‘Still’ fans, too. I know what they want and obviously Brad [Bell, executive producer/head writer] is listening. It’s time for Steffy to dive into something that is new and fresh. As I said, it’s wonderful to work with Scott but it’s time. It’s time to go on this journey [with] Tanner [Novlan, Finn], who is absolutely wonderful. But while it is exciting, it’s also bittersweet because now that Steffy does have a new love interest, we’ve got to be eight feet away from each other. I’m like, ‘Come on!’ It’s almost like, ‘Steffy gets a new love interest, but it’s actually a doll [laughs]!’ ”
Lisa LoCicero (Olivia, GH), who was a diehard fan of Tristan Rogers (Robert) when she watched the show decades before joining it, cannot believe her good fortune to find herself in a storyline with him. “Right before we shut down [production due to the coronavirus in March], I was like, ‘Dude. I think there is going to be some adventure between Olivia and Robert Scorpio, and the universe would not be so cruel as to take this away from me! It cannot happen!’ It was right in the middle of shooting big scenes I had with Tristan and Wally [Kurth, Ned] that we got called to the floor and they told us we were [shutting down]. I said, ‘I hope I don’t become a trivia question: Who are the last two characters to kiss on GENERAL HOSPITAL?’ Because it would be me and Wally [laughs]! I am very happy that that is a piece of trivia I am not associated with.” Working with Rogers more than lives up to her high expectations. “He’s got a great sense of humor. He has that very been-around-the-block energy to him and a rakish charm. He seems like the kind of guy you could tell your worst secret to and he’d go, ‘Yeah, I get it.’ He’s always going to have those twinkly blue eyes and that wry smile and that amazing accent. He’s just as cute now as he was all those years ago.”
Being an actress, a real estate agent and a mom to sons Desmond, 8, and Beau, 6, is all in a day’s work for DAYS’s Heather Lindell (Jan). “I don’t know what happened. I blinked my eyes and they went from babies to toddlers to big kids,” she reports. “It’s exhausting. Two boys that are close in age; I might as well have twins. They love hard but they fight hard and everything has to be equitable. Even though they’re not the same age, they have to have exactly what the other has. I love them and they’re everything. They’re both really sweet kids.” They didn’t love her seeing her reprise the role of Jan in “Last Blast Reunion,” however. “I made the mistake of show- ing them the ‘Last Blast’ because my husband and I were super-excited about it and we put it from our phone on the TV and the boys were super-freaked out by it and did not like it at all. They were like, ‘Mom, what are you doing? It’s so scary!’ My older one, after I showed it to him, said, ‘Never play that for me again.’ They lit me pretty dark and everything was happening kind of in this underground lair where Jan was living and [she’s] sitting there putting a bomb in a cake and acting all crazy and my older son, I think, was traumatized. He did not like it. I’m going to show them the network stuff and I think that they’ll be really excited.”