Fetching coffee and making copies are not the only jobs recent
college graduates can find. Eric Winter, who graduated from UCLA in
2000 with a degree in psychology, works an average of three to four
days a week, four to eight hours a day.
“I don’t even get into work until one, and
I’ll leave at five,” said Winter.
Winter, along with fellow Bruin alum Heather Lindell, a 2004
theater graduate, is an actor on “Days of Our Lives,”
an NBC soap opera.
The life of a soap star is not all glamorous, though.
“(The workload) ranges based on how big the storyline
is,” said Lindell, who on some days can work eight to 12
hours.
And since soap operas air every weekday year-round, it can be
difficult for the actors to take more than a few days off at a
time, especially when their characters are involved in a major plot
line.
Winter explained that actors can put in requests for vacations,
and the head writer will determine when their characters can be
spared. And the ways a character can be sidelined are numerous.
“They’ll put you in a coma,” Winter explained.
“They’ll kill you and bring you back.”
Lindell is currently enjoying some freedom as her character, Jan
Spears, lies in a coma.
“She hit her head on a rock,” explained Lindell,
“so I’m traveling a lot.”
Occasionally, however, Lindell has to return from vacation to
film hospital scenes.
“They will show me lying in the bed,” said Lindell.
“Last week I woke up and went back (into the
coma).”
And it doesn’t stop there. Winter, who plays Rex DiMera,
admits that the storylines can get a little wacky.
“We laugh about it on set,” said Winter. “(My
girlfriend on the show) had an abortion and didn’t tell me.
My character is really smart, like a genius, yet he can’t
figure out that his girlfriend has been lying to him for six
months.”
In addition, Winter’s character Rex decided “very
intelligently,” Winter said jokingly, to venture off in
search of his brother, who is a prisoner of war.
“I’m very frustrated with my storyline right
now,” said Winter. “Neither (of the events) have
happened to me in real life.”
Lindell, too, has not been able to draw much on real-life
experiences for her “Days of Our Lives” role.
“(My character) kidnapped Shawn Brady and welded a cage
and basically held him prisoner. She tried to seduce him,”
described Lindell. “She is way too far out for anything I
have experienced in my life.”
Soap opera characters often stay on the show longer than the
actors who portray them, so it is common in daytime television to
recast a role when the original actor leaves the show.
The replacements must both maintain and free themselves from the
former image of the character.
“At first the audience was apprehensive about me,”
said Lindell, who replaced another actress in the role of Jan.
“They warmed up to me after about a month.”
In winning over fans, Lindell had the additional problem that
Jan is not the most likeable person in the fictional town of
Salem.
“I play a crazy, psycho, evil vixen,” Lindell said.
“People hated the actress before me.”
Since taking over in 2004, Lindell has tried to make the role
more playful and is now the character most fans “love to
hate.” However, even the chance to create a character does
not always garner an immediate warm welcome by the show’s
large and dedicated following.
“I was an original character, which is good,”
explained Winter. “Recast characters are tough.”
But Winter rolled his eyes when he spoke of the way Rex was
introduced on the show,
“I started out as an alien and then it turned out I never
was an alien. It was a big science experiment.” Winter said.
“Fans hated the storyline, so they hated me.”
Luckily, fans quickly warmed up when it was confirmed Rex was
human.
Acting on a soap opera is neither Lindell nor Winter’s
final goal, though Lindell could not imagine herself in another
profession. Lindell has wanted to be an actress for most of her
life, having graduated with an emphasis in musical theater, and
would like to pursue theater in New York.
Winter, on the other hand, believes in having a fallback.
“Acting is a profession that you could want to do all your
life but it’ll never happen,” said Winter.
At UCLA, Winter majored in psychology, but when he first
transferred he was a psychobiology student.
The “biology” part of his major fell through,
however, when the science classes proved hard to miss for his
burgeoning modeling career. Winter took time off from school in the
beginning of his junior year to pursue modeling.
“You get a job for a lot of money in Spain,” said
Winter, “but you have a midterm. I decided to bank on it.
When you are hot, you have to keep hot.”
Winter’s “Days of Our Lives” contract expires
in June. And though he would not say for certain if he will seek to
renew it, Winter has said he aspires to do film, and has already
done some high-profile acting gigs.
“In the Britney Spears commercials (for her perfume),
that’s me in the hallway,” said Winter.