LAUGHTER IS CONTAGIOUS: One of Steve Burton’s (Jason, GH) fondest memories from his time in Port Charles involves him doing something his character would never do: getting a major attack of the giggles. “It really was one of my greatest days on set, man,” he says fondly. “Maurice [Benard, Sonny] and I would get the giggles a lot and we would get rebuked and yelled at over the loudspeaker, but this one day, I don’t know what was going on, but something triggered Maurice and Kelly [Monaco, Sam] and me and we literally could not stop laughing. There was nothing that you were going to do to tell us to stop laughing. Someone could have been like, ‘Hey, your whole family needs you right now back in Tennessee,’ and I would have been like, ‘I can’t stop laughing.’ We could not stop, would not stop, so they had to take a five. I had to get away from Maurice and Kelly to try to get it together. Kelly walked away, and Maurice walked all the way down to the end of the set. So we were kind of calming down, and two or three minutes go by, and I look at Kelly and we don’t laugh, which was a good sign, and then we look down the stage — and Maurice is standing there smacking himself in the face to try to make himself stop laughing! And that just made me and Kelly start laughing all over again. Just talking about it now is making me laugh.”
DEEP IN THE HEART: Martha Madison (Belle, DAYS) recently moved to Texas with hubby AJ Gilbert and their daughter, Charley. “I’m not joking when I say my closet is as big as my bedroom was in Los Angeles,” she cracks. “It’s so true when they say that everything is bigger in Texas.” The reason for the relocation was a personal one, Madison shares. “My mother is battling a disease called FTD [frontotemporal dementia] and she’s out here. I have a four-year-old daughter and I felt it was time to really put our family first and put those relationships in close contact for as much time as possible, so we made the move. I don’t expect to live here forever, but for the near future, we’ll be here.” Madison has no plans to give up performing, however. “I have a couple of little projects that will be shooting in 2018 in L.A. and I just signed with an agency in Atlanta,” she reports. “When I get settled here and get a better handle on my schedule, I hope to pursue that still. I’m an actor. I’m never going to stop acting.”
ITALIAN STALLION: Winsor Harmon did a lot of traveling during his 20-year tenure as B&B’s Thorne, but his top destination will always be Italy. “Representing the show on that kind of level — shooting in places like Venice and Portofino — was phenomenal,” he recalls. “I’d lived in Italy before. When I was 19 or 20 years old, I lived in Paris for nine months when I was working as a model, then I was shipped down to Italy and I lived in Italy for three years, and I didn’t know anything about soap operas whatsoever. Years later, I went back to Italy to shoot in Portofino, where we stayed at the Villa d’Este in Lake Como and they really took care of us. They loved B&B over there! When we were in Sorrento, John McCook [Eric] and I and Darlene Conley [ex-Sally] and Dan McVicar [ex-Clarke] got locked into a restaurant for four and a half hours because the fans mobbed the place. There were over 5,000 people out front. We literally could not get out of the place, so they put us on lockdown. It made all the papers. I never realized how extreme the show was until then. I can’t even explain to you what B&B has done in allowing me to achieve things that I wouldn’t have normally achieved, and I’ll be forever grateful for that.”
THIS IS ME: Justin Hartley (ex-Adam, Y&R et al) jokes that he often gets questions about how much alike he and his THIS IS US character, Kevin, are — since Kevin is a talented but sometimes shallow actor who has sometimes been accused of skating by on his good looks. “Before I even saw it, I actually got word of the script through a friend of mine who’d read it and wanted to know if Dan [Fogelman, creator] and I were, like, friends that went way back,” Hartley chuckles. “He goes, ‘Do you know Dan Fogelman?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he goes, ‘How long have you known him?’ I said, ‘I know of him.’ And he goes, ‘Because I think he wrote you in a script.’ So, I thought, ‘This [audition] is going to be so easy! I’ll just waltz in there and be me.’ But, I know what he meant by that, so that attracted me to it. I read it and thought, ‘Hell, I can do this!’ It’s very funny and very touching, and every single character and story in the script is just so beautiful. The character development throughout even the first episode is just gorgeous writing, and it just keeps getting better and better, and I just feel luckier and luckier.”