Here at Soap Central, we're lucky enough to have plenty of opportunity to chat up daytime stars from General Hospital, Days of our Lives, The Bold and the Beautiful, The Young and the Restless, and all the soaps from the years past. We hear a lot -- and we mean a lot -- of juicy tidbits about the actors' work lives, personal lives, and everything in between. They don't always make it to the final feature article. But luckily for you, we're totally up for sharing most of the fun (and at times inspirational and controversial) tidbits that some of daytime's biggest stars divulge to us on a daily basis.
Bryan Dattilo
(Lucas Roberts, Days of our Lives)
The writers at Days of our Lives are jumping into the soap's past and bringing controversial character Valerie Grant back to the canvas later this year. The story will no doubt bring the soap's 1970s era to the forefront of longtime viewers' minds, leading us to wonder what other stories in the NBC soap's past would be fun to revisit. We're still mulling it over, but Bryan Dattilo knows exactly which stories from Lucas' past he'd love to revisit.
"Lucas was burned in a fire and put in a coma because of something his mother did, and it looked like it happened on purpose to him," he shares with Soap Central. "So I think at some point, he would appreciate that being brought up again, because it's always something in the back of his mind, like, "You let me burn in a fire and put me in a coma. What happened there?!'"
"But my relationship with Sami [Alison Sweeney] is also something that is always there, because his heart was broken when she chose E.J. [James Scott]," he continues. "That would make great storyline, to kind of revisit that. But I don't know [if it will ever be possible], because Sweeney is doing her thing, and it's tough to know anything about the future. But that will always be a big part of Lucas' life and a big part of who he is."
Cady McClain
(ex-Rosanna Cabot, As the World Turns; ex-Dixie Cooney, All My Children)
Julianne Moore knows the value of her time on As the World Turns, having mentioned her stint as Frannie Hughes when accepting her Screen Actor's Guild Award for Still Alice back in 2014. And Cady McClain also values her time as the now-defunct soap's Rosanna -- even if she admits it was quite brutal.
"When I was on As the World Turns, I worked harder than I think I've ever worked on any show, ever," she tells Soap Central. "The demands that were put on us actors were very high, and some of us could handle it, and some people couldn't. But I certainly learned if I could make it there, I could make it anywhere."
"We had to do things like pick up our own wardrobe and get our blocking and get our hair and makeup in less than an hour and be on set and be ready to go, straight to tape," she continues. "Some people will know what that means, and some people won't. But we would literally run down halls to get everything done before we had to be on set to act, and I would never want to work that way again. It was brutal. BRUTAL! But at the same time, I feel like I did some of the best work of my life. But... really, it was like acting boot camp. The days that Julianne was on in the 80s and in the early 90s, it was a different world. We had time. We had all day. In 1988, on All My Children, we came in in the morning for blocking, we had breakfast and then we had camera blocking from 10 to noon, then we had lunch, then we had dress rehearsal from 1 to 3 and then we taped the show from 3 to 6. I mean, we had all day to work on these scenes, and it was hard work, but it wasn't like being shot out of a cannon. So I can understand why she would look fondly at those years, because she was developing her process in an environment that was a supporting process. These days, if you don't have process already in your back pocket, you're going to have a hard time."
Daniel Goddard
(Cane Ashby, The Young and the Restless)
Ever wondered why you never see Daniel Goddard nominated for a Daytime Emmy award, even though he consistently delivers stellar work as The Young and the Restless' Cane? It turns out it's by choice.
"I'm not a big fan of acting awards, which is why I don't submit for the Emmys or anything, because I just think, how do you judge what's good and what's bad?" he says. "It might be easy to judge what's bad, but to judge what's good is such a subjective thing, so to say somebody is better than somebody else, I don't [want to be a part of that]."
That doesn't mean, however, that's he not supportive of the hard work that everyone from the cast to the crew puts into making daytime television a reality. In fact, he believes it's deserving of much more praise than it gets, especially when you compare how daytime is made to how films are made.
"You have scenes in movies where they have multiple takes, multiple angles, with a script that's had years in development... and somebody cuts a scene together, and they go, 'Oh, my God, did you see so and so and so and so? It's brilliant,'" he explains. "Well, give them a script where you've had a team of writers sit there and put [it together in] a day, where you have to shoot one scene in one take and then seven scenes back to back with that same actor, and that actor does the gamut of every emotion there is in that part of the storyline, and you watch it and you feel something -- that's brilliance. You can't compete with the quality of work that we deliver on The Young and the Restless. You just can't do it. And people who sit there and they snide, 'Oh, that's daytime.' Well you know what? You're speaking out of [turn], because you have no idea what goes into making what we make, and until you walk in our shoes -- and many have tried -- you are very, very inclined to fail."
Would you like to see Lucas and Sami have another go-around? Are you surprised to hear how hard it was to work on ATWT? And do you agree with Goddard's sentiments about the Emmys and the work daytime employees deliver? We want to hear from you -- so drop your comments in the Comments section below, tweet about it on Twitter, share it on Facebook, or chat about it on our Message Boards.
