The first thing you notice about Mark Lawson, Brody on OLTL, are his gorgeous blue eyes, but after talking with this talented actor you realize there is much more to him than those “beautiful baby blues”. I recently had the chance to sit down with Mark in NYC and get to know how his journey to daytime began.

As a journalist as well as a fan, I always find it interesting to discover how some of our favorite actors began their careers and Mark’s story is like many others – a story of determination, talent and fate.

Mark says he knew at a young age, like 5 or 6 years old that he wanted to be a performer.

He said that he “was always a performing kid – I was always and still am very dramatic just personally – my Mom started me auditioning for local community theater because that’s all we had where I grew up in Bristol, VA – this was at age 7. It started as just a hobby”. It wasn’t until Mark got to college that he was trying to figure out what his major would be because theater and acting were almost a given so he didn’t think he needed to focus on that and that this would be the time to focus on something else, but his faculty advisor told him to declare himself a theater major.

After graduation from the Boston Conservatory, he studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) for a year. While there he had a teacher who convinced him he should think about moving to LA instead of NY to try and do film and TV. Mark said one of the things he loved about LA is how fitness based the culture is there (which would prove helpful in the future for him). “The first 2 years in LA I was working in a video store, not like a Blockbuster but almost like a library where a lot of industry people came to do research on the films they were doing. It kind of became my film school and I would take home 5 movies a night and watch them – I would get on tears where I would watch every Steve McQueen movie, then every Robert Mitchum movie, then every Paul Newman movie – I kind of made that my job”. Then a customer from the store came up to Mark and told him what good shape he was in and that he should be a personal trainer. 2 years later he was still training this customer as well as others.

When I asked Mark how his acting career out there was going he said that he booked his first acting job almost a year to the day that he moved to LA – it was an episode of Cold Case but then he didn’t work for 4 years after that. OLTL is actually his 2^nd professional job. I asked how OLTL came about and Mark said “I was all but out, I was done – but I was training a friend of mine, Danielle Harris for the remake of “Halloween” and I was like cool, I’m not in the business anymore – all I want to do is be a trainer – I want to start working my way to being that trainer of celebrities. She ended up inviting me to the premiere when the movie came out and I sat right next to her manager, who actually had tried to sign me when I did the Cold Case episode (where I met Danielle). It took her (the manager) a couple of weeks on the phone to get me to come in for a meeting and then a couple of weeks after that to decide if I even wanted to give it a shot. There was a lot of soul searching going on because when you have pretty much decided you don’t want to do it (acting) anymore it’s a huge relief (once the decision is made)”.

Mark did sign with the manager but not telling her in his head that he was giving himself 10 more auditions –(you often hear these stories from other actors that they give themselves a time limit and often get a job right after they make this decision) and OLTL was his 4^th audition and 15 months later here we are.

Mark told a funny story about his screen test – when he received the material for the audition, the sheet with the wardrobe they wanted him to bring listed the first items and it was 5 pairs of underwear (a sign of things to come!) and he said to himself  “I guess I  know what that means”.

I mentioned to Mark that after seeing him on screen after the first couple of days I remember thinking “he’s got the goods” – he can really act and when I told him this Mark said he “makes it his mission to follow in the footsteps of actors I admire – stylistically like the old school guys like McQueen and Mitchum.

What he loves about Brody is that the writers gave him “someone who is damaged to begin with and he was able to explain why he was damaged and fill that up”. He has been given the rare opportunity to see this character completely change from a bad boy, to a surrogate father, to a war vet, to someone recovering from the trauma of war to a loving boyfriend to Jessica.

His first day on the set was a “doozy” Mark says – he “got in a bar fight, discovered what had been going on with Gigi all these years, and then at the end he made out with Melissa Fumero (ex-Adrianna)” and he got to work with the legendary Robin Strasser. He said Robin was great to him that day.

Now that he’s involved with Jessica Buchanan, he has the opportunity to work with the heavy hitters on the show – Erika Slezak, Bob Woods, Brian Kerwin and Jerry VerDorn and he says  “he never expected to be working with actors like that” – the cream of the crop”. They have taught him about pacing – if you know if you’re in a storyline that is going to take 4 months you can’t play everything on the 1^st day.

Mark mentioned that although he signed a long-term contract, Brody was not supposed to be a permanent character, but obviously TPTB saw that he could act and “honestly that he could take his shirt off” and he is thankful that he is a working actor.

As much as Mark loves TV and film he knows nobody has the work ethic of daytime actors, but as a working actor one always wants to explore other avenues and Mark is no different. Since he was a musical theater major in college, pursuing Broadway is always an option – we know OLTL is a springboard for performers on the Great White Way  (Kathy Brier, Renee Goldsberry, Jay Wilkinson to name a few) but he has a lot of other things he wants to accomplish like taking a shot at primetime and movies – something concrete that people can watch now and in the future (on DVD’s) because that’s the kind of fan he personally is. As much as he loves acting, Mark says he doesn’t know if he will always be in front of the camera – maybe directing or producing are in his future.

I have a feeling that whatever Mark chooses to do, be it daytime, primetime, theater or movies he will be successful. Mark is an intelligent, talented, handsome and charming man who will be around for a long time to come.

Thanks to Debby O’Connor and of course to Mark Lawson for taking time out of his schedule to meet me for this interview. It was truly a pleasure.