Interview Outtakes

Jane Kaczmarek (ex-“Felicity,” ex-“Party of Five”) on how she told me how she and ex-husband Bradley Whitford are able to make it work since getting divorced in 2009: “Brad and I have a really wonderful relationship. The marriage couldn’t work anymore, but I think that we still have an incredible fondness and love for each other that we really want our kids to see as we become friends. We just think of it as a family that lives in two different houses.”

Eric Braeden (Victor, “The Young and the Restless”) on avoiding another catastrophe in New Orleans: “I know specifically that Germany sent the most modern sump pumps to New Orleans. That was never mentioned. No one ever heard about it. If you want to solve the problem in New Orleans, get engineers from Holland and Germany and they’ll fix it. I promise you, they’ll fix it. And they don’t build those jokey damns that they have. I mean, it’s laughable what they had there. They have, in Holland and Germany, lived with the violent North Sea for centuries. They know how to build damns. They really do. I have friends in Germany. They immediately offered help. The Army Corps of Engineers are doing something, but I don’t think they are very capable necessarily. Get the engineers from Holland and from Germany, where they have dealt with the violent North Sea for centuries. They know how to do it, trust me.

David Charvet (ex-“Melrose Place”) on why he didn’t attend Comedy Central’s roast of David Hasselhoff: “I was invited to it, but I didn’t go. I love David and really respect him. I know these roasts can get pretty mean, and I just didn’t want to do that to him.”

Patricia Wettig (ex-“thirtysomething”) on going back to school to get her MFA in playwriting: “Honestly, I think I was getting a little bored, creatively. As an actress you always have to wait for somebody to come to you. You have to be given a script or you have to have something to do. And I felt like I had a lot of stuff that I wanted to express myself. I just recently did a play that I wrote up at New York State and Film. And it was such a successful reading and I was so excited. So I’ve been having a really good time writing lately. The truth is I’ve always written. The first paycheck I ever got as an actress, I bought a typewriter. So it was always there.”

Interview: David Charvet Is The Perfect Teacher

David Charvet is well known to fans as a hunky lifeguard on “Baywatch,” but he stretched his fan base even further when he went on to star on the nighttime soap “Melrose Place.” Since then, he has been busy with his music career, being a father to his four kids (with fiancee Brooke Burke) as well as fitting in a movie here and there when his schedule permits. His latest movie is the Lifetime Movie Network thriller “The Perfect Teacher” (which airs Sept. 12 at 8 p.m. ET), where David stars as a good-looking young teacher who becomes the object of desire for one misguided student.

Daytime Dial: Tell me a bit about the movie and your role in it.

David Charvet: “The Perfect Teacher” is about an actual story that happened with a student and a math teacher. This is kind of an issue that happens a lot nowadays, where younger women, high-school girls, fall in love with their teachers. For me, it was kind of interesting to play a teacher, because I have never played one before. After having four children, I also wanted to play a father. So, for me, those two elements were really more interesting to explore as an actor.

DD: How could you relate to your character, Jim?

DC: Being a father is something I can really relate to and really wanted to play. The other thing was, he’s a good guy. He loves his family and he’ll do anything for his kid. He’s a hard worker and he has a lot of passion for life. I can really relate to that. I have a lot of passion for life and I really love to do everything at 100 percent. That’s the kind of character he was.

(Photo Credit: Albert Camicioli/Lifetime Movie Network)

DD: As a father of daughters, was it difficult for you to play a teacher who becomes the object of a young girl’s affection and fantasies?

DC: Funny enough, that was kind of the hardest thing for me for this role, to actually be able to justify that when this girl is coming on to me that I don’t completely see it. Obviously, Jim knew that she was kind of flirtatious, but that it wasn’t really going anywhere, especially with my girlfriend also being one of her teachers. I think that he’s figured it all out kind of toward the end. Sometimes I think that guys are like that. Guys aren’t always figuring things out right away, and it takes them a little bit of time, especially in the woman department. He honestly felt that she was a girl who was a little lost herself.

DD: How was it to work with Megan Park (“The Secret Life of an American Teenager”)?

DC: Megan did a great job on this. I have to say that it probably was not the easiest role in the world, and I think she did really well. I actually saw the movie a couple of weeks ago, and I thought she played it right. Sometimes you can play this so over the top, and she didn’t do that. She kept it real. I think we all tried to keep it as true as possible and make it as real as possible, that if these circumstances really did happen we wouldn’t look like we were completely out there.

DD: What is the lesson learned from this movie?

DC: The biggest message is what can happen to somebody who is actually trying to do his job and be a good teacher. This is happening in schools today, so we are just kind of portraying a story that could possibly happen. I think it’s important for people out there, especially young kids, to realize that they could actually ruin someone’s life when their schemes get out of hand.

Interview Outtakes, Part 2

Here are some blurbs from stars that did not make it to the print version of the interview, but were too good not to publish.

Jess Walton (Jill Abbott, The Young and the Restless), pictured, on what she likes best about Jill: “I think it’s the humor, the way she’d call Katherine and old trout, her sarcastic tongue with Esther, and the strength that she never does stay down for long. I think people like that. I used to have women come up to me and tell me that they were trying to raise their daughters just like Jill. Now, of course, I thought that was going a little far, but I appreciated the sentiment and their love of the character.”

David Charvet (ex-Craig Field, Melrose Place) on competing on The Superstars, which premieres June 23: “Without giving too much away, there were a lot of interesting personalities on the show. Terrell Owens is just a ball. He is so much fun and so funny and just so sarcastic. He and (NBA star) Robert Horry would go back and forth. There were some events where we thought these guys were gonna whip our butts, but a lot of the celebrities held their own. It wasn’t all about physical challenges; it was also about using your head and figuring out a strategy with your partner. It was not just about being physical, but about being intelligent and just going for it.”

JoAnna Garcia (Megan Smith, Privileged) on her co-stars: “Lucy Hale (Rose) and Ashley Newbrough (Sage) are so good and so sweet and so driven. I couldn’t be more proud to work with them. They bring the levity to their characters as actors, because that’s how good they are. But then the heart of their characters is really what they are as people. It’s a nice combination of what these women are real life.

“With Laurel, Anne Archer’s character, what is so special is her strength and determination, and because of those things you see what that has afforded her. But then she plays this vulnerability that is just so heartbreaking and so touching. She is just a very real and a very powerful woman. She fights the stereotypes and isn’t afraid to make the tough decisions. But at the end of the day, she is really human. I couldn’t think more of Anne as a human being, and as an actress, I am just in awe of her.”

Bobbie Eakes (Krystal Carey, All My Children) on her favorite part of performing with the Divas of Daytime: “When you get a chance to do something you are proud of, it is very rewarding artistically — plus we have a good time with each other. The rehearsals are almost just as fun as the performances. Anything we want to do is on the table. It’s an opportunity to pull songs out of your repertoire that you’ve always wanted to do. We also experiment with doing songs differently.”

Bobbie also spoke about performing with her sisters when they were younger: “My sisters and I had an amateur group where we started singing in the neighborhood. And then it became semiprofessional as we became older. I’m really the only one who took it to this level, although a couple of my sisters also have been a part of different local groups in their different towns. All five of us were singers growing up.”

Interview: David Charvet Shows Us What He's Made Of

David Charvet is perhaps best known for his roles on Baywatch and Melrose Place. On Melrose, David was the man (as character Craig Field) who was finally able to tame bad-girl Sidney Andrews. However, their happiness was very short-lived: She was hit by a car and killed on her wedding day.

David’s latest project retains all the excitement of his previous endeavors, without all the melodrama. In fact, his new show might even gain our new president’s seal of approval. That new show is called The Superstars, an athletic competition that pits teams of celebrities and professional athletes against one another in a series of strenuous and strategic competitions.

David explains: “The Superstars is a show that was first on back in the 1970s on ABC. When we met to shoot the show, they showed us a clip of a Barack Obama interview where he says The Superstars was his favorite show. It’s a show about athletes competing against one another; the twist on our version of the show is putting celebrities with athletes and pairing them up together. We compete in bicycle races, obstacle courses, swimming, triathlons, rock-climbing — all of these hard, physically demanding things — and see who’s the best at them.”

David and his partner, Jennifer Capriati, were quick to size up their competition. “I knew that (All-Pro NFL receiver) Terrell Owens would be a force to be reckoned with, with his tremendous speed and agility. There was another girl, Brandy Chastain, a gold medalist in soccer who won the cup against China. She’s so well rounded. I knew she’d be our competition.”

Among the other celebrities, David kept his eye on Julio Iglesias Jr. “He was unbelievable and super-fast. He was paired up with Brandy. He’s an outstanding athlete. I was really impressed with him.”

The Superstars was filmed on location at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas. David says: “That was a lot of fun. The whole facility is really beautiful. The people are wonderful there. It was 15 days of bliss. And to be able to be competing with all the people I was working with was a dream come true.”

David didn’t get a lot of time to fully enjoy all the resort had to offer, explaining, “We had two days off out of the 15, and it was mostly just icing down and recuperating.” He was grateful that his fiancee, TV hostess/model Brooke Burke, and their children were able to join him at the island paradise.

Aside from The Superstars, David also has a new film in the works called Nephilim, a sci-fi action thriller created and directed by Danny Wilson. “It’s a comic-book series that’s being turned into a film. It’s a trilogy of films, and I play one of the lead superheroes, a priest named Father Markus Knight. I can’t say much about it yet, but it’s a very dark series about people dying and coming back to live and fighting evil and all that.”

With the announcement of the reincarnation of Melrose Place (following in the footsteps of the revamped 90210), there is also one question that has to be asked of a former Melrose Place actor: Can we expect to see David on the new Melrose? He reveals: “Right now I think they are really focusing on trying to get the show on the air and introducing the younger characters. As of now there hasn’t been talk of my going back there. However, it was a fun show, and if there is an opportunity to do something great, I’d love to be involved.”

In the meantime, don’t miss David on ABC’s The Superstars. The six-episode run begins Tuesday, June 23 at 8 p.m. EST.