Kyle Lowder (ex-Rex/ex- Brady) was thrilled by the opportunity to work with Nadia Bjorlin (Chloe) and Eric Martsolf (Brady) during his recent return to Salem. “Honestly, I don’t mean to play favorites but those two are two of my favorite people to work with,” he raves. “Obviously, Nadia and I started working together over 20 years ago, and Nadia is probably one of my all-time favorite people to work with. We’ve always had an inexplicable chemistry on screen where you don’t even have to try. Eric is somebody that is one of my favorite people personally, so any time we can get together or work together is a blast. Not to mention the fact that Rex and Chloe and Brady started to have some scenes the last time I was there, so it was something with a couple of things brewing to it, and it was nice to have a few scenes with them. I think they have great chemistry together and it was great to explore that. I really enjoyed it. It was fun times on set.”
When an ailing Rey collapsed from being poisoned on Y&R, his portrayer, Jordi Vilasuso, was determined to get it right the first time. “Sometimes when you get to do something like this, it’s all in the physicality,” notes the actor. “You want it to be believable, so you need to avoid doing too much or not enough, so I really leaned on my directors and we figured this out together. I really felt like I had a safety net with them, so if I tried it one way and it didn’t really work, I felt reassured to try something else. I had the coffee table to buffer my fall so I hit that first, then went down, boom, and we got it on the first take. I was so happy about that.” Vilasuso says he received praise from his soap wife, Sharon Case (Sharon), for his stunt work. “She’s so great to work with because she’s very encouraging,” he praises. “It’s been wonderful to tell this story with her. She makes it so easy for me to fall into character and really feel this relationship with Sharon, the character. She’s such a pro that there’s never any second-guessing when we work together. She’s a great scene partner and I have a lot of respect for her.”
ONE LIFE TO LIVE fans will want to check out Tony-winner Renée Elise Goldsberry’s (ex-Evangeline) new series, GIRLS5EVA, a female-powered comedy about a one-hit wonder ’90s girl group that reunites to give their popstar dreams one last shot, coming on Peacock. “I’ve been in a lot of girl groups,” Goldsberry shares. “Somehow or another, I’ve always been in some trio or so of girls.” As for her new character, she says, “The beauty about playing Wickie is.... You have an excuse to hold the notes a little longer than you’re supposed to. No one really thinks you’re a jerk when you try to steal the show. It’s pretty nice [laughs]. My character is over-riffing and singing too long. It’s really fun. It’s a triple threat situation [of acting, singing and dancing]. Clearly, they didn’t see my dance audition before they gave me this job.” When it comes to her own girl group tastes, Goldsberry says, “I love every girl group ever, but I tend to be the biggest fan of ones that were not clearly pushing one girl; like it wasn’t clearly an audition for one girl to break forward. I love it when they truly needed and depended on each other, like they couldn’t have done it by themselves. I love TLC. The three of them together were the perfect artist. They’re my favorite.”
Photo credit: Paul Zimmerman/Shutterstock
GH’s Kirsten Storms (Maxie) had a tricky day at work when Maxie’s wedding to Peter went up in smoke and she had to navigate her character’s reaction to his exposure as a criminal. “When Valentin comes forward [to levy accusations about Peter], that was challenging to play because in the past, Maxie and Valentin haven’t gotten along with each other,” she notes. “For me to play that Maxie instantly believes him wouldn’t make much sense because why would she believe that the person she’s in love with is [a bad guy] because Valentin says so? But when Anna walks out and says, ‘It’s true,’ Finola [Hughes, Anna] already had tears in her eyes as she was so gorgeously walking down the aisle, and I just started hysterically crying, because she does that to me! That’s when I think it all hit Maxie. Even though I felt that they were challenging and emotionally exhausting, I felt really good about doing those scenes.”