Scene And Heard

THOSE WERE THE DAYS Though he was gone for 13 years, Kyle Lowder (Rex) says some things felt very familiar at DAYS when he returned to the set. “It’s that time-warp essence,” he explains. “When you have Nadia [Bjorlin, Chloe] and Farah [Fath, Mimi] and Ali [Sweeney, Sami] on set, and you look behind the camera and you see the crew and people you have known forever and were there before, all of a sudden you’re like, ‘Did the past 13 years happen? I don’t know!’ It just seems like everything’s the same.” Well, not everything. “Farah, Nadia and I have a lot of history on that show. We played the teens on DAYS. Farah is almost there, but we’re all parents now. We talk about different things now. Back then we’re like, ‘Friday night! What are we gonna do?’ And now it’s like, ‘My kid has a fever and I spent all weekend at the doctor. What am I gonna do for dinner? I’m gonna order takeout. I don’t wanna cook tonight.’ The conversations are totally different. They go from fun and carefree, like, ‘What club are we gonna hit up tonight?’ to ‘I gotta get home to the kids.’ That’s the only difference. Those women haven’t aged a day! That made it kind of trippy, as well.”

CAKE WARS B&B’s Jacqueline MacInnes Wood (Steffy) was thrilled to get to see the legendary Brooke/Taylor rivalry back in action watching Katherine Kelly Lang (Brooke) and Hunter Tylo’s (Taylor) cake fight in the kitchen after Hope and Liam’s wedding. “I was so impressed by that cake fight,” she says. “It’s tough enough to do as is because you’re doing it in gowns and heels, and people forget that the ground becomes very slippery very quickly. When you’re in high heels, you’ve really got to perform a balancing act. It’s always fun to film those scenes, but especially enjoyable watching them. Those two were a riot. We tried to keep a straight face through it, and it was so hard because you can’t just do a pickup shot if someone slips out of character. Once you’re a mess, you’ve got to keep that straight face, and they stayed completely committed. When Annika [Noelle, Hope] and I walked in on them, we didn’t realize that cake was going to come flying our way but that’s what happened. It was so funny. In fact, when they yelled, ‘Cut’ after getting the shot, [the ladies] couldn’t hear it because they were still screaming and throwing things, so they just powered through.”

SCARE TACTICS With prank-pulling on her mind, Chloe Lanier lugged “a toddler-sized, freaky-looking” doll with her when she recently returned to the GH set to reprise the role of Nelle. “I bought it for Halloween decoration and it kind of looks like Chucky, but with brown hair and dark eyes,” she sets up. “I brought it in to hang it up in Josh’s [Swickard, Chase] room to scare him, but when I knocked on his dressing room door to see if he was there, he was already inside, so I was like, ‘Darn it!’ Then I was like, ‘Oh, I can do it to Chad [Duell, Michael],’ but then Chad freakin’ walks up. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, you ruined everything!’ That was literally what I said to him. I didn’t even hug him or say, ‘How have you been?’ I was just like, ‘Chad, you ruined it!’ Then I looked at the [call] sheet to figure out, ‘Who isn’t here yet that will be here today that I would feel comfortable scaring?’ I saw James Patrick Stuart’s [Valentin] name and I was like, ‘Yes!’ And I ran and I put it up right inside his doorway. Ten seconds later, he comes down the hallway. We talked for a bit and caught up and then he opens the door to his dressing room and he [shrieks] and then he’s like, ‘Who did this?!’ Laura Wright [Carly] walked by and she goes, ‘Oh, my God, I didn’t do that, but I wish I had, that’s amazing!’ I was like, ‘I did it, I’m sorry!’ — and I’m pretty sure he proceeded to put it up in Michelle Stafford’s [Nina] room! So, the doll is still there. I hope that it is traveling around from dressing room to dressing room, scaring everyone on set.” At press time, she seems to have gotten her wish: It made its way into Tamara Braun’s (Kim) dressing room, and Braun posted a shot of her mystery intruder on Instagram.

WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY Peter Porte (ex-Ricky, Y&R) reveals some behind-the-scenes details about his very last scene on the show, which was when his character was shot, then fell to his death. “That was so fun to shoot,” he recounts. “It was the first time I worked with a squib [packet of fake blood that explodes]. It was me doing the first part of the stunt, so there was the gunshot, the squib went off and I pretended that I got hit and then hurled myself backward through a candy-glass window. There was a mat on the other side of that piece of scenery that I landed on.” Part two required different planning. “They had another set built for the exterior of the building that was two stories high, where a stunt guy fell from that backward,” Porte explains. “It was cool. I thought that it would’ve been fun to shoot, but then I see the stuff that I do and I see the stuff that Tom Cruise does in Mission Impossible and I’m like, ‘Yeah maybe I’ll let someone else do those stunts.’ I’ll happily fall out of just a window and onto a mat.”