Soap Town USA ------> Current Interview

I had the pleasure of sitting down and chatting with Brian again, face to face, about this next phase of his promising career - he wanted his fans to hear it first, straight from his heart. With his typical openness and candor Brian Gaskill shares his thoughts and feelings on everything from his career choices, further reflections on Rafe and Port Charles, life, love and some surprising personal revelations.

Enjoying what was supposed to be a hiatus from Port Charles to recharge and focus on the future, exploring various projects outside of daytime, Brian Gaskill has been busy planning his next move. Cancellation of the show has left the talented actor free to pursue other career opportunities and he is more than ready for the next challenge.

Initially not sure about a return to daytime at this particular juncture, after being relentlessly pursued by both ABC and CBS, Brian has decided to switch networks and join the cast of The Bold and the Beautiful.

“When it came down to it”, Brian says “the idea was exciting.” “I’m being offered the chance to play a character that I might not have been given the chance to play. In the ten years since Brad Bell has taken over he’s made a commitment to bringing really great actors on the show. I really like (Emmy winning actress) Jennifer Finnigan and I’ll probably be sharing screen time with her along with Adrienne Franz and Sean Kanan, a great group of actors. Watching Jack Wagner really helped me make my decision too because he brings a different kind of energy. I think it’ll just be good work. The show is probably more balanced than other shows in their use of all the actors. The schedule will allow me to pursue other interests as well as having a life, and a more comfortable life at that. Port Charles six month on six months off schedule turned out not being as great as it sounded. It was really hard. It’ll be nice to slow down to a normal pace again.”

While it was an extremely emotional decision for the popular star to make, especially since ABC has been home for Brian twice in his career, he feels he’s made the right choice for who he is and where he wants to be at this point in his life. “It was a very difficult decision. There are a lot of reasons why it was better for me to stay in Los Angeles right now. I have my footing here for the first time in a long time, this is where my life is right now and for me to rip up and go to All My Children in New York would completely disrupt that,” Brian says, but he adds, “I could have gone to New York and once I realized that, the decision became about the work. I want to try this new character, try working for new people and see what that’s all about. In the end I chose The Bold and The Beautiful because I think there was a part of me that wanted to go back to All My Children simply because it was easier, more comfortable going back to that character, even though it would have been different now.”

Having made the difficult and emotional decision to walk away from the familiar, I wondered how Brian would really feel if Bobby Warner was recast right now. His honest answer punctuated the integrity with which Brian lives his life. “It would be weird but its fine. I think there’s been too much publicity at the moment for this to happen right away, but Bobby would be a totally realistic recast. If I had never played Rafe and this all wouldn’t have come up I would never have had to think about playing Bobby Warner again. I’ve been gone so long, it wasn’t like recasting an existing actor, which happens so often on daytime, anyone could play Bobby at this point. It could definitely happen.” Would Brian go back to Bobby Warner in the future if the opportunity ever arose? “Unless I’m really, really desperate for a job someday I don’t know if I’d be comfortable playing Bobby again if someone else played him in between. I wouldn’t want to take anybody’s place.”

“I went over to the CBS studios yesterday and it was strange but it was a confirmation that this was a choice that needed to be made”, Brian confides. “This adventure that I was afraid to go on, the type of character that I’m going to be playing was something that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do. I was trying to pretend it had nothing to do with fear but it did and I decided to face that – work with new people, a new show, a totally different character. As an actor it just became exciting. Brad Bell has been very open abut creating the character together so it will work for me. I’m not just sitting on the sidelines, he’s making me feel very involved.”

While the seasoned pro couldn’t divulge too many details about the role or developing storyline, hard as I tried, he would say that it’s a total departure from Rafe, edgy and exciting with a history grounded in New Jersey and Las Vegas, related to the Marone family.

“It might not work”, Brian laughs,” Rafe was a surprise, but it just might.” “I feel this really big responsibility about the character, especially in the first month, to make it different from Rafe. Not to the point where it becomes bad acting because I’m doing a caricature or because I’m trying so hard to be different but that’s partly why I took the role, to explore a different person.”

Port Charles’ cancellation had a bigger impact on the introspective actor personally than he originally realized and played a role in his initial thoughts on leaving the daytime medium for a while. In chatting with him it was clear that the opportunities that presented themselves because of it put him at an important crossroads, so to speak, in his career and life.

“The reason I wasn’t initially going to go back to daytime – first of all I was really more affected by the cancellation than I was dealing with,” Brian admits. “I was in denial about it and really did feel like it’s over now, I’m going to go try other things. I’ve spent a lot of years as an actor and I’ve had some years where I was unemployed. I wanted to set up a situation where I could continue to work but where I could be as free as possible to pursue other things. This will, to a huge degree, allow that. Okay I thought, maybe I can still do this and do other things. The Bold and the Beautiful offered the best situation. It’s just an idea that I have about my life. I don’t want to feel like I have to make some statement about myself like I’m walking away from daytime so I can be taken more seriously as an actor, I want to say, screw this, I’m going to do it and still be taken more seriously. I’m going to do everything, have it all. Somewhere along the line I won’t of course but it won’t be because I’m on a daytime show. It’ll be because that’s what fate will end up allowing.”

“Sometimes a career ends up being defined by what you say no to, not what you say yes to and I experienced that this week, probably for the first time, that I can actually say I said no. There are certain jobs on my resume that I really didn’t want to do but I was scared or desperate and had to pay the bills. I did pass on both shows and I was comfortable with that decision. But when they came back with better offers it seemed like I could continue to work, make a good living and still potentially be building my career, building on the projects that Marie (Mathews, Brian’s manager) and I are trying to produce, pursuing other things while staying in Los Angeles. It all seemed like it was going to work out so that I could continue to build my life and build my security as an adult. They gave me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” Brian grins, that megawatt smile lighting up the room. “A little bit of letting me have my cake and eat it too!”

Outside of acting, producing and directing are unquestionably part of Brian’s creative interests and goals. Though he was reluctant to point to anything definite for the future preferring to keep his mind and options open, he shares, “I’m heading in the direction of just trying to be more true to myself and not make any clear statements of what that will include. At the end of the day life is going to throw stuff at you and you don’t exactly know what‘s going to end up. I’ll be happy with myself wherever I do end up. Yes, I’m interested in producing and directing but I’m getting a little self-conscious about making too many statements about – guaranteed I’m going to do this or that and then 10 years down the line realize I still haven’t done all that and I end up feeling like a failure.”

“I just want to tell stories. With this new job, just like when I was playing Rafe, I’m really interested in telling the story. In an ideal world where I’m not just an actor for hire, just the utility actor that shows up and tells someone’s else’s story, I’ll be telling stories that I’m really passionate about, that I want to see told. And I’m headed in that direction, to be able to do that kind of stuff,” Brian chuckles, “but you never know.”

Teaching is another creative outlet Brian feels is and has been part of his life for a long time. His recent experience teaching a high school drama class workshop for several days proved enormously rewarding and going forward, no matter where his busy career takes him the actor hopes to always hold it close to his heart. “If for some reason the big picture doesn’t end up exactly as I want it to I know I can still find a way to be happy, and that’s what I’ve learnt from this. I hope everything turns out in my career the way I dream, but if it doesn’t I definitely have control over my life turning out the way I dream.”

Moving forward, taking on this new challenge is exciting for both actor and fans alike - incidentally Brian Gaskill will be one of the very few actors ever to air on two networks at the same time. For three weeks we’ll have the double pleasure of watching him on both the old and the new. But with Port Charles airing through Oct. 3 the show is still very much on our minds. No discussion with Brian would be complete without touching on Rafe and Alison, perhaps the very definition of the quintessential soap opera lovers, with a decidedly divine, as in heavenly, twist. For all the supernatural or otherwise struggles the couple has gone through, and lets face it, they’ve had more highs and lows than any couple could be expected to weather they’re still fighting. True soul mates if such a thing exists?

For the gifted, perceptive actor, not to mention heavenly in his own right, always so good at making the romance believable and convincing even when it wasn’t, the idea of soul mates is more complicated and earthly than Rafe might see it. “I always thought it’s really dangerous to deal with soul mates because then you need an end – you need to stay together and live happily ever after”, Brian suggests. Especially with Rafe and Alison, you go to heaven and back, that’s the end of the story. My issue with the idea of soul mates is that if the possibility exists that I believe in soul mates sometimes life just gets too hard. You can be so in tune with someone, so in love but you’re just holding on so tight for dear life. You can turn that corner and realize your life is full of light and realize maybe I don’t need to love you so much to be happy. That’s what I liked so much in the beginning with Rafe and Alison. It would have been nice for Rafe to discover some of the light again. And if he wasn’t going to find that in Alison hopefully he’d find it in someone else.”

“Rafe had to be the perfect fantasy man all the time, and I got sick of that sometimes, I didn’t really appreciate it,” Brian confesses, “but then in the first week of The Gift there was a total shift in the character. For the first time I saw Rafe as a man and it made sense at that moment - really these two people had just fought a war. He’s human now and having to deal with all that, eventually you’re going to break. They’re still there, they’re still standing but it’s not going to be easy.”

Two of Brian’s favorite movies of all time are both about angels – acclaimed German director Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire and the sequel, Far Away So Close. Identifying so closely with the title characters, the movies were a huge inspiration to the actor for the subtext of what was going in Rafe. “In Far Away So Close, you have a character who thought he would be an angel forever who’s decided to try being human for a while”, Brian explains. “He ends up really experiencing the dark side of being human, and while I didn’t experience the same thing with Rafe, it would have been interesting to me, for as much as Rafe was a fantasy character, to really get to the point where he went into a period of, screw it, I’m human now, you want to live like this fine, I’ll live like this and just went off the deep end – turned really dark, maybe drank too much.”

But the story didn’t end up going that way. Gaskill muses, “part of the unfortunate thing is – you fell in love with Rafe as the ‘perfect fantasy man’ but for the story to go on you have to go to different places for it to work. You see this person (Alison) who you have faith in, you’re in love with, you have experience with –that’s why I said it should have been a movie and it should have been over – if you’re going to continue you have to go to different places, and that is sometimes not going to be so popular.”

Had the show continued the poetic actor had a vision of where he would have liked to have taken the character down the road. “I sort of had a whole story in my head,” Brian reveals. “I would have liked Rafe to go to a point where he completely lost track of himself, of who he was, where he came in, what was important in his life, and then experience a complete rediscovery of faith.” Going even further, Brian continues with, “so much has gone down between Rafe and Alison that it would have been completely believable had there been another girl involved eventually.”

Strong words coming from one half of one of the most successful and popular couples on daytime but Brian feels, and I would have to agree, “I think it would have been okay. At the end of the day, Rafe and Alison would have maybe found each other again. I always think there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for those two, but I also think things can sometimes just get too hard. You just want to laugh again, you know. I’ve been there, I’ve been so in love but it just gets too hard. “

To Brian Gaskill, not to mention viewers, Port Charles was different. Simple innocent love on one side, dark, perverse obsession on the other, good vs. evil in all its guises. The show took risks pushing the envelope of traditional soap fare while always trying to hold on to familiar soap opera themes. The result? It connected with a lot of people who quickly turned into avid fans. But that didn’t seem to make a big enough difference faced with a ratings system that, it can be argued, never reflected the show’s true fans, or numbers.

“Yes, it was different but it didn’t make a big enough impact,” Gaskill says. “The time slot was bad, certainly because it had that cult feeling. In general the Nielsen averages are probably pretty close but you’re going to have situations that break the rules, especially a cult type of audience that doesn’t fit established guidelines. Theoretically I think a lot more people were watching it.” Brian continues, “I know so many viewers connected to the supernatural bent.”

“This show should have existed like Dark Shadows or Edge of Night that were on at 4:30 pm,” the actor theorizes. “Now there are talk shows. Port Charles definitely needed to be on when kids came home from school.” “You love it and a lot of people who aren’t in school anymore love it,” Brian chuckles, “but the demographic the show was going for was basically younger, and to have that show on while that demo was in school seemed like a losing game.”

And it was. Always on shaky ground financially, Port Charles struggled to find its audience before the idea of angels and vampires became a reality. With big money ruling network television, creative integrity tends to be overshadowed by what advertisers feel best sells their products and values. But sometimes, if we’re very lucky, that effort by big business to try to turn things around one last time can produce surprising results.

“Sometimes something good can happen,” Brian notes.“Port Charles came up with the vampires for that reason. If a show is on its last leg,” as Port Charles was, “something creative to change it, to fix it happens because there is nothing to lose. When you’re in a situation in life where you’ve got nothing to lose you take risks. You take those risks, it saves your ass and then you’re in a safe place again. All of a sudden you’re being careful again; you’re not taking that lesson you’ve already learned which is you have to take risks.”

Speaking of taking risks, in an effort to dig a little deeper into the actor’s psyche I threw Brian what I thought was a curve and asked some rather personal questions but as always he threw it right back at me and played along, answering everything with his natural grace and charm.

Favorite Indulgence? Groaning Brian teases, “That’s really hard to say in G-rated way. After a bit of a pause he goes on, “my indulgence lately is actually the opposite of what you might usually think, like going overboard on something, but now I’m indulging in trying to be good to myself, taking care of myself. I’m getting lots of sleep, going to the gym, maybe getting a massage or two.”

Guilty Pleasure? “Soap operas and those reality dating shows,” he sheepishly admits. But in a comical twist Brian’s cable went out while watching one of those reality dating shows. “It was like a sign from above that said you shouldn’t be watching this,” he laughs.

Dream Role? Barnaby Gaitland in Ann Tyler’s Patchwork Planet. “I somehow think the role of angels seems to be a recurring theme in my life,” the actor chuckles. “I love angels,” he goes on to say, “ just the idea, what its enabled me to do – the experience of Rafe and the power of reaching out to people – its something that I think will always be a part of my life.”

Any role you wouldn’t do? “I wouldn’t do something I thought I’d be bad at, if I couldn’t do it right, I wouldn’t do it. As a producer I would never look at a script and put myself in as actor just for the sake of putting myself in, no matter how badly I might want the role.

Tough to choose the right roles and handle the inevitable rejection that comes with the territory? “You never really know if the roles you choose are the right ones. You have to take risks and trust your heart and sometimes they’re not going to be right.”

Continuing, “You’re rejected a lot as an actor, more than you’re accepted. It either kills you or makes you stronger.”

Ultimate dinner companion and what would you cook? “Hmm, what would I cook, probably have to be lasagna with homemade sauce – I actually cooked lasagna for Christmas this year (my mother usually makes it) and everyone was all rather happily impressed.”

Becoming rather quiet and much more serious, Brian reflects, “I think I’d like to sit and talk with God. It’s a really deep issue with me, the idea of faith and I respect it so much in other people. I have a personal relationship that’s very quiet, in those moments it happens, but I have yet to define it – it has nothing to do with not having faith, it’s just a faith I have yet to define. I have a hard time living in anyone else’s definition of it.”

What makes you laugh? “Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.”

What ticks you off? “Wow, I guess a lot of things in Hollywood and how it’s really difficult to be yourself and be okay.” Using Las Vegas as a metaphor to explain his point, Brian proposes, “The fantasy of Vegas has really taken the place of what the fantasy of Hollywood once was. Maybe it was all a lie anyways, but used to be you could have this idea that once you got into this ‘magical’ bubble that surrounds Hollywood – like going to a Shwab’s drugstore to be discovered – you could reinvent yourself. You could be whoever you want to be. It certainly doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever really did. As soon as you get here you can’t be whoever you want to be, you can be exactly who you’re told to be or should be, and the only way anyone is going to believe in you is if you do exactly what you’re told. Eventually, hopefully you’ll break the rules and do whatever you want but it’s really hard to do. This has become a very conservative, puritanical, constraining town. It just kills people’s souls. The mythology still exists in Vegas; it’s still a place where people can go to reinvent themselves. Sort of like in the process of trying to think of where this new character I’m playing on Bold and the Beautiful is coming from spiritually and philosophically, there is a sense of this type of energy in Vegas. It’s like a get out of life free card.”

Website plans? “In the next few months I’m going to start making some changes, refresh it, keep it updated, add new photos. I’d really like to make it a mix of personal things, career developments and things to make the world a better place. Just sort of this is me, this is my site and this is what I care about.”

With Port Charles cancellation a reality, the fan club dinner Aug. 22^nd will be a bittersweet ending, a chance for the cast to connect one last time with their fans. “This one is more important than any of the other fan clubs event,” Brian notes. “This time it won’t be about reaching out to fans, trying to get more people to watch the show but about saying goodbye. It’ll be nice to put Port Charles to bed together.”

Don’t miss Brian’s charity event on Aug. 24^th (for more information log on to www.briangaskil.com). It’s a great chance to connect with the actor himself, view his acclaimed short film Higher Ground and support a very worthy cause.

“We’re all grateful for the incredible support, love and passion from everyone. It was amazing,” Brian marvels, with heartfelt gratitude. “The show was a cult phenomenon - we won’t even know the truth about how big it was. “We really all felt it was a great team. Like I said not everybody got along all the time but it was very much like a family and it was our family. It was fun, I loved doing it and I’ll mourn the loss”.

The news that Brian Gaskill will still be lighting up our small screens with his talent, his inner light, that smile that melts hearts and the unique connection he creates to a character and his audience, came as a wonderful gift to his legions of fans. Count me at the top of the list always, a fan of not just the actor but of the person Brian is. His honesty and integrity, within himself and towards a character makes Brian one of the most natural, sensitive and caring actors in the entertainment field. It’s been a privilege to take that journey with him and a pleasure to always follow the ride. So, on to the next adventure. Brian is ready and so are we.

My thanks to Brian Gaskill, and his manager Marie Mathews for their support and generosity of spirit. Max