Interview Outtakes, Part 5

Charles Shaughnessy (ex-Shane, Days of Our Lives): The streets of Hollywood are littered with people shattered by broken dreams. If you hadn’t been so set on some point in the future and had just been there in the present and seen what opportunities are in front of you — if you could see what was there right then and there, I think you’d have a lot less disappointment and frustration.

Peter Bergman (Jack, The Young and the Restless): For the first time, Jack is realizing that he is now head of the family. It’s going to be the longer story-line arc over the next couple of years — Jack taking his seat as head of the family.

Rena Sofer (ex-Lois, General Hospital): I intend to understand that you really can’t change your children’s mind on who they are going to choose (as a love interest). If you try to get involved in those choices, you might get kicked out of their life. Unless that choice is truly a dangerous choice, even then, you want to be there in case your child falls down. You don’t want to be so disconnected that he or she can’t come to you because there is too much water under the bridge. As a parent, it’s my job to guide and not my job to control. But it’s hard because I like to be in control.”

Robert Newman (ex-Josh, Guiding Light): Ellen Wheeler really understood this need for me to go away and do theater. It’s very easy to write a character out for a month: Josh went away on a business trip. And then you come back very refreshed having been challenged in a different way. It would give me more energy to move forward with Joshua. Other producers didn’t like the idea of me going away, but Ellen was very good with that, I think because she had been an actress for so long.

I rehearsed Sessions almost exclusively on my own, because the cast wasn’t really available, and the times they were available, I was doing Guiding Light. Once the show opened, I had this commute from hell. I live about 50 miles north of Manhattan; Peapack, New Jersey, where we shot all the location stuff for GL, is about 100 miles west of where I live. So I would do that drive at 5 a.m., shoot GL all day, and then drive another 45 miles or so into the city from there, and either shoot more stuff in the studio for GL or do Sessions, and then come back home around midnight, and then repeat the next day and the next day.

Sherri Shepherd (The View): My cast (of Sherri) is a dream come true. They cast Malcolm Jamal Warner as my husband, and he’s gorgeous. Initially, when they first said Malcolm Jamal Warner, all I could think was, this is Theo from The Cosby Show. Then he walked in the room and his voice is deep and he’s been lifting weights, and I realized, this isn’t Theo from The Cosby Show anymore. He is absolutely gorgeous. Michael Boatman from Spin City plays my son’s pediatrician, and we kind of have been dating a little bit. They keep bringing me these gorgeous guys on the set, and they have my character playing the field.