Last year, Lisa LoCicero (Olivia, GH) shot a movie directed for Paramount by her husband, Michael Jann, called Organ Trail. “It’s streaming now on Amazon and anywhere else you normally stream your movies,” the actress reports. “My son, Lukas, is also in it. It’s not exactly horror, but it’s a bloody Western with a lot of tension.” Shooting the project “was very cold,” she shudders. “When you watch the movie, you’ll see that it’s not exactly a bunch of supermodels on a beach talking about their lives! We shot in Montana, in the dead of winter, with horses and frozen ground and blizzards. That part was not pleasant. It was a very arduous shoot, and when I wasn’t working, I made a lot of stews for the cast and baked cornbread and stuff like that.” In the end, “It was really rewarding,” in no small part because the film also stars Lukas. “Being able to work with my son and playing his mother was a bucket list experience that is pretty much unmatched,” she beams. “He’s such a great young actor and I’m really proud of him. Walking off set with my son and my husband as a family was really a once in a lifetime experience that I’ll never forget. And the finished product is something that I’m really proud of. I play a character so unlike anything that I would otherwise get to play and I was really nervous going into it because, you know, you’re sitting there in the first screening and all your friends are there and there you are, on the screen with no makeup, playing a prairie lady, and you don’t want to completely stink up the screen with your acting! It’s like a nightmare scenario — ‘There’s the director’s soap opera actress wife, pretending to be a prairie lady, badly!’ But I was actually really happy with my performance, which I almost never say! Watching it for the first time, I felt a massive sense of relief. I’m really proud of Michael, too, for what he did as a director, especially under such difficult [shooting] circumstances.”
Before joining B&B in 2019, Matthew Atkinson did his homework on Thomas’s relationships with the Forresters, and wishes there was one relationship he got to explore since joining the soap, that of younger sister Phoebe, Steffy’s twin, who died on screen in 2008. “I did get familiar with that [scenario] and Jacqui [MacInnes Wood, Steffy] and I have had a few scenes where we were able to re-create small moments about what came from that,” he shares. “While it is innately heartbreaking, I think it also explains the way that Thomas and Steffy are the way that they are. It would be nice to revisit that somehow and experience that somehow. I wish I had been there back then to shoot scenes because that would have given me experience to draw on when talking about it. It’s obviously an emotional and destructive thing that the both of them had to go through, along with their parents, obviously. It would have been nice to have been there to play that. But I try whenever I can, whenever Phoebe is brought up in conversation, that Jacqui and I are able to bring back a little of that pain. Losing a sibling is such a life-changing experience and I’m so glad whenever the writers give us the opportunity to play those emotional scenes.”
Photo credit: Gilles Toucas/Courtesy Of Bell-Phillip Television Inc
“We had a blast,” quips Conner Floyd, (Chance, Y&R) of the nail-biting scene where his character deactivated the explosives strapped to Faith. “I’m probably gonna get flagged by the government because for about a week I was looking up how to defuse a bomb on the Internet to get as much intel as I could get before I went to work,” explains the actor. “I also watched a lot of very good movies, like The Hurt Locker, so I was really into my research but when we got on set, there were a couple of difficult shots I wasn’t expecting. Still, it was fun and interesting, and I hoped it played real.” Although Floyd always enjoys working with Sharon Case (Sharon) and Joshua Morrow (Nick), he was impressed with Linden Ashby’s (ex-Cameron) performances. “I only got to know him just a little bit while he was with us but the dude sure did a great job playing crazy,” Floyd marvels. “I would see Linden around the studio and think, ‘He does look insane.’ They always had him looking dirty and beaten to a pulp, but he was phenomenal.”