Scene and Heard

In his recent Dishing With Digest podcast interview, Richard Burgi (Ashland, Y&R; ex-Paul, GH et al) expressed high praise for one of his co-stars. “Eric [Braeden, Victor] is so handsome and has this gravitas,” Burgi noted. “I thought he would be this pompous fellow so I thought I would take the piss out of him, but as soon as I met him, he took the piss out of me and I loved him so much for that. He immediately put me at ease. I watch him and go, ‘Gosh, he’s so good and I get it.’ Here’s this guy I’ve seen for years and years [on TV] and he still hasn’t aged. God almighty. I have such respect for him and he’s such a goofball. What a sweetheart.” Burgi’s kudos aren’t reserved for just the veteran actor. “I was really impressed by Michael [Mealor], the gentleman who plays Kyle, and his professionalism,” he praised. “A lot of the younger actors are really squared away. That’s why I’ll tell this to anyone at any time, I respect daytime actors more than any other actor. They’re the hardest working, the most humble for the most part and super-talented. I’ve done it all and for me, as an actor, it’s the most challenging.”

GH’s Dante appears to be conquering his psychological conditioning, but for months, Dominic Zamprogna had to portray a character at the mercy of the click of a pen. “Unfortunately, the pen thing reminded me of this comedy group in Canada called The Kids In The Hall,” the actor reports. “They had a show that I watched religiously when I was a child and there was a skit from back in the day where Bruce McCullough was running around screaming, ‘My pen! My pen! Someone took my pen!’ And that was all I could think of anytime someone would click the stupid pen and I needed to be in this serious place to act like this pen was Dante’s greatest foe [laughs]. When I was doing those scenes in the hospital with Roger [Howarth, ex-Franco] and Becky [Herbst, Liz] and Kelly [Monaco, Sam] after Dante got stabbed when he ran in front of Franco, Roger was like, ‘So ... what’s going on with the pen-clicking and you not looking at me and acting like you’re going to kill somebody?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve kind of been hypnotized by Obrecht with a really cheap pen.’ I mean, it wasn’t even a nice pen! It wasn’t, like, a fancy gold pen. But they did use the same one every time, which was really funny to me. If it was a really special pen, I’d understand why it was always the pen, but it’s literally a pen you’d find at, like, a bank teller.”

John Stamos (ex-Blackie, GH) can be seen on the Disney+ series BIG SHOTS, playing a girls’ basketball coach in need of some serious redemption. But the role didn’t come without some trepidation on Stamos’s part. “I got a call, I remember, from my agents and managers,” he shares. “They said, ‘You are going to get an offer on a new David Kelley [L.A. LAW, BOSTON LEGAL et al] show.’ I said, ‘He’s my favorite. I just love him. What will I play? Do I play a lawyer?’ They said, ‘It’s a basketball show.’ And my heart sunk, because I am so bad at sports. And I said, ‘I don’t play. Do I play? Am I an old player?’ They said, ‘No. You are coaching.’ Then it was, like, ‘Do coaches have to play? Do I have to play?’ I’ve never been much of a sports guy, and I sort of panicked when I heard it was about basketball, but I dug into that part of it as much as I could. I went to a rehearsal with [former L.A. Laker] Jerry West. I guess they call it a practice, but I called it a rehearsal — and he didn’t. I was looking for a way to play an adult character that had layers and wasn’t just, you know, light and fluffy. That’s all in here. It’s one of my favorite jobs I’ve ever had.”

DAYS’s Stacy Haiduk (Kristen/ Susan) admits it isn’t always easy to keep her characters straight on tape days. “It does get confusing sometimes,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll be doing Kristen as Susan and the writers will write, ‘Kristen in her own voice will say this,’ but sometimes because I’m dressed as Susan and doing the Susan accent for so long, I’ll be doing Kristen and then I’ll slip into the Susan voice because it gets confusing and then I have to stop myself and say, ‘It’s Kristen, not Susan.’ But I just kind of go with the flow on it. Kristen doesn’t like having to be Susan because she gets frustrated that she can’t use her Kristen power and her sexuality. Susan as Kristen, it’s kind of fun. Anytime I get to play Susan, she’s this breath of fresh air. She’s light, she’s all about love and she’s just this cool, fun-loving person, so if I have to get into something serious, it’s very hard for me to find that in Susan because she just wants everything to be lovely and pretty, puppies and rainbows. So it’s all about knowing what character I’m playing, and sometimes when I have to do both of them in the same day, the Susan is so light and easy to get into so I just fly into her, but Kristen as Susan gets very frustrated because she’s fighting to get her man back.”