Days of our Lives is currently letting Kristen, as played by Stacy Haiduk, cool her heels in prison — for a crime she didn’t commit… for a change — while Susan is getting mixed signals from the universe about who shot her precious Elvis, and what’s wrong with her bestest friend is the world, Marlena. Susan’s other lookalike siblings are scattered around the globe – the ones who aren’t dead, anyway. We first met the clan in 1998, thanks to actress Eileen Davidson (Ashley on The Young and the Restless) taking on a record number of roles. In the new book, Super Soap Scenes: A Time Capsule of Daytime Drama’s Greatest Moments, Davidson reveals how it all came about:
Key Takeaways:
- Another actress was originally supposed to play Susan
- Davidson’s personal life informed all the other characters
- How to rehearse when you’re acting against yourself
Costume Party
Tom Langan, who was the Co-Executive Producer at the time, told me they were going to try to get somebody to play the part of Susan. I suggested that I play it. She was supposed to be really different from Kristen. (Headwriter) James Reilly put in the Elvis stuff. He created the rough sketch, and I filled it in. We added a padded suit, false teeth, contact lenses, and we tried out some wigs. But, I created her personality. I had a lot of input. Susan was supposed to be insecure, from a small town, not very worldly, basically kind of ignorant. She had an innocence. I based a lot of it on innocence, not necessarily ignorance. But, she was very intelligent in a certain way. She was good at getting what she wanted.
(At first), they only had Susan in mind, and they really didn’t know for how long. James just kind of took off. He’s brilliant.The whole story was brilliant, with the teeth falling out at the wedding, all those things he wrote were so funny. He took inspiration from me, I took inspiration from him. For Susan’s different hairstyles, I watched Eight is Enough – which is strange because Dick Van Patten is now my father-in-law – but, one of the characters on the show, I don’t remember which daughter it was, wore her hair in pony-tails on each side of her head, and up high. I was looking for different crazy hairstyles for Susan. I was looking for anything and everything. I would add things like Susan screaming at the vampire movie with popcorn in her mouth. Then James added all the different characters as we went along.
Bad Religion
I did go to Catholic school, so when it came to Sister Mary, I went in very broad strokes, like the ruler was my idea. The fact that she was strident and a disciplinarian. But she had a soft heart. A lot of nuns, in my experience, were like that.
The one thing I wanted with Thomas was a comb-over. Trying to be a man was definitely the most difficult. My voice is deep, but it’s not as deep as a man’s! We had to work on that. He was only around intermittently.
No More Drama
As a lead actress who’d always been known as a dramatic actress, it was just such a hoot for me, and so freeing to just let go and have fun. I had a tape recorder and I would read the scene and turn it off when the character I was supposed to be talked. I ran lines that way. The major way that I knew it was working was because the crew was laughing, and I was laughing, we were cracking up all the time.
