FAMILY REUNION: Though they’ve never crossed on-screen paths at GH, Trent Dawson (Huxley) and Roger Howarth (Franco) shared many a scene on AS THE WORLD TURNS, where they played Henry and Paul, respectively. “By the last year on that show, I think I was suddenly related to half the town of Oakdale,” Dawson chuckles. “There were a lot of weird, quirky moments and me looking over at Roger as Paul going, ‘Yeah, I’m your stepdad now.’ He has a very dry sense of humor, which I love, so I really enjoyed working with him.” When the actor recently reprised his GH role and saw Howarth at the studio, he reports, “It was great to catch up with Roger. All these people on WORLD TURNS started having kids way before I did; I was, like, the lone hold-out bachelor until I was 40. When I ran into Roger and he found out that I live in Westchester [County], which is just north of New York City, he immediately started talking to me about this children’s library that I should take my kids [Jack, 2, and Emma, 10 months] to. It was the dorkiest conversation [laughs]. He was giving me parenting tips on good things to do with my little ones and I really appreciated it, but I never thought in a million years that I’d be having that conversation with Roger — or anyone else!”
Photo credit: JPI; STEVEN BERGMAN
FALL SEASON: When asked if she’s ever had a regrettable experience on set, Mishael Morgan (Hilary, Y&R) has a quick response. “It was actually my first and second embarrassing moments,” chuckles the actress. “We were taping a scene in Hilary’s suite at the GCAC and I was sitting at the desk. I had to go to the door for some reason, so I got up, but the heel of my shoe got tangled in the telephone cord and I tripped. I guess the angle from the booth, they thought I had crashed into the wall, but I was able to catch my balance. It was an embarrassing almost- fall.” Of course, that wasn’t the end of the story. “A couple of minutes later, one of the producers came up to me and said, ‘Oh, my gosh, we thought your head went into the wall,’ ” Morgan recalls. “I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m really good at not hitting the floor,’ and as soon as I said that, someone pulled a cable I was standing near and I went straight down to the floor.”
MOTHER OF INVENTION: Though Kym Douglas (Sharon, B&B) says her son, Hunter (dad is Y&R’s Jerry Douglas, John), could easily be in front of the camera, he’s taking a different route. “If anybody in our family should be doing soaps, it’s probably Hunter,” she chuckles of her handsome offspring. “But, he is at USC [University of Southern California in Los Angeles] now and he’s in his second year at their Marshall School Of Business. He has created a wonderful Instagram page called The.Success.Journal [www.instagram.com/the.success.journal] with the motto: ‘At 19, I have no idea what it takes to achieve success, so I decided to reach out to the most successful people I know and ask them how they did it.’ It isn’t about the people who are the richest, although he’ll be interviewing some major movers and shakers for it. But, he’s also going to interview a lot of people whose success is having a wonderful family, having a love that they thought they lost but found later in life, having a beautiful garden. It’s all these different levels of success that are not necessarily what we’ve all been told success looks like. It’s so wonderful that he wants to inspire others. What’s more worthy than that? Yes, you can tell I’m a proud mom [laughs]!”
ACTING OUT: DAYS’s Judi Evans is having a ball upending the Kiriakis mansion as Bonnie and working with Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins, who plays her alter ego’s cohort Sheila. “I adore her,” Evans smiles. “She’s an incredibly talented artist, and I’m so happy that I got to know her a little bit, because we worked together so much. She’s a great mother. She was also willing to run lines whenever possible. She was digging the whole story.” Evans also likes the off-the-wall scenes between “Adrienne” and Maggie, especially Bonnie’s fantasies of what she’d like to do to her foe. “Bonnie is a big movie buff,” Evans points out. “There are movies that she relates to, and they play a big part of her fantasies. Suzanne [Rogers, Maggie] went all the way in those scenes, and so did I. The whole story is giving everyone a chance to really explore their characters in different ways. It’s wonderful.”
Photo credit: JPI; GETTY IMAGE