The Bold and the Beautiful’s Rebecca Budig and Days of Our Lives‘ Greg Rikaart sat down with Budig’s co-star Scott Clifton for a candid conversation on the newest episode of Soapy. Clifton opens up about leaving General Hospital, how he learns his lines, and why he has mixed emotions about one of his Daytime Emmy Award wins.
Blurred Lines
Scott shared with the hosts how he does not prepare the night before for his upcoming scenes, which came as a surprise to both Rikaart and Budig.
“I’m so bad at looking at my lines before. I just wing it every day. People memorize things and recall things in different ways, and there’s short-term memory and long-term memory. So how you memorize is one thing. I memorize by just doing it. It’s really hard for me to just sit and read.
“I remember Tony Geary [Luke] back in the day at GH,” he continued. “He would just sit in silence and read, and then he would know his lines, and I would go, ‘how do you…there’s no dialectic…there’s no interaction there.’ I could spend four hours looking at my 30 pages of dialogue the night before, just reading it to myself and try to learn it that way, or I could learn it in the 90 seconds we have in rehearsal right before we tape, because I get to do it with another actor.
“I had this awesome storyline [on B&B] with Rena Sofer [Quinn], and she would ask for scripts even earlier than they would come out, because that’s what she does,” Clifton said. “She needs to start learning it, and that’s her process, like weeks before, and then she’ll learn all of them at the same time, and to me, that’s a superpower. I don’t know if you guys are like this, the minute I finish a scene, it’s gone. It’s like survival mechanism.
“We had a writer on B&B when I first came on, who I know wrote for GH for a while before that,” the actor explained. “His name is Patrick Mulcahey. He was one of my favorite writers, and he ended up leaving the show, but everything he wrote was poetry. It felt like you were doing Sorkin or Mamet or Shakespeare. It was music.”
Golden Girl
Back in 2017, The Young and the Restless’ Kristoff St. John and Scott Clifton found themselves going head-to-head in the coveted Lead Actor in a Drama Series category at the 44th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards. A win for either performer would have made history, placing them in the record books as the only actor at the time to capture trophies in all three competitive acting categories: Outstanding Younger Actor, Outstanding Supporting Actor, and Lead Actor.
Scott got candid about that particular Emmy win. “I have a lot of feelings about that moment in time because, yeah, that was the first year that they [changed the rules]. It used to be you just pick one or two shows. This was the year allowed you to take scenes from up to four different shows and you didn’t have to use the entire episode as long as you’re not putting things out of order. I was fascinated by this, and I just was lucky enough to figure out how I could use that. I was like, ‘Okay, well, I’m going to use this to tell a story.’ But I didn’t have the best performance. I just gamed the system better than any of the other nominees.
“That was a year that Kristoff should have won, needed to win, deserved to win,” Clifton said. “He and I had lots of conversations about that. It mattered to him because we had both won for Younger and Supporting, and if either one of us got that Emmy handed to us, it would have been like a record of the first actor to have all three. Sure, it’s historic. And that was very salient to him. He was so wonderful…he came up to me after and he congratulated me. He said, “Well, you did it. You got the record. I remember, I said to him, well, technically, I didn’t. Because for supporting, I tied with the late Billy Miller, who was playing Billy on Y&R. So I have not won in all three categories. I’ve won in two and tied in one. And so the next time you win an Emmy, Kristoff, you will break that record.’ I think that helped. I think that mattered to him.”
Wisdom Comes With Age
Clifton was also candid about his ego at the time of his departure as Dillon. “I left GH like a cocky little shit. I decided not to renew my contract because I was like, ‘I’m going to make something of myself and I’m going. This was just a stepping stone. [I am going to] go out there and find myself and be a big-time movie actor in superhero films.’ And then, a few months later, cut to me living back home with my parents. Then I got a call to test for One Life to Live in New York. I was only on that show for a year and change.”
Change Is Here
The trio also discussed how the soaps of yesterday have to change with the times. “I think that we’re on the precipice of soaps it’s like adapt or die, right, and culturally, I think 20, 30 years ago, it was sexy and attractive for a man to be torn between two women who were fawning over him and him having to go back and forth, and it was a Ridge, Brooke and Taylor [type story]. That was like soap bread and butter for a really long time. But I don’t think we live in that world anymore.
“I think that we’re at a place now where that’s not only not attractive, but beginning to be unattractive,” Clifton explained.” That doesn’t mean you still can’t play the story. It just means that when I’m playing Liam, I’m recognizing that I’m not playing the hero. I don’t care how it’s written. I’m not playing the hero. I’m playing that we all know, that we all tolerate, but we wish that he treated women better. There’s something entertaining about that, too. Like, I would never be friends with Liam in real life. There’s this weird paradox about soap operas, where it’s kind of the inverse of real life. In real life, if you meet a cheater and a murderer, right? Yeah, this guy cheats, he shouldn’t be cheating, and that’s not okay, but we’re still friends, he made some mistakes, and whatever.
“But a murderer, you stay away from that person,” explained the actor. “You want absolutely nothing to do with them; they’re evil, they’re a bad person, they’re a murderer, right? In soaps, it’s the opposite. If somebody’s a murderer, like Sheila Carter…yeah, she’s murdered like five people, whatever, but she’s so funny.
“But with someone like Liam, who’s trying to be a good guy, but he keeps breaking, he’s insensitive or selfish or whatever, we as an audience, we tune right into that and we hate that about him,” he admitted. “We hate how he treats women, you know? And yet we know so many people in real life that are just like that.
“Soaps give us this space to really hate the qualities in the people that we kind of have to be okay with in real life, and enjoy the qualities of people that we can’t be okay with in real life,” he continued. “It’s an interesting switch.”
Fame Game
“I think there’s only a handful of people in the world that would understand this, but fame, right? Like, we have this society, we have this concept of fame, but it’s not a monolith. There are different kinds and levels of fame. Tom Cruise knows that anywhere he goes, everyone is going to know who he is. There’s a sacrifice there of his anonymity and his privacy and his freedom, but he’s covered socially. He knows exactly what to expect in any situation.
“We go to a restaurant and maybe we’re having a bad night, or maybe we’re tired or whatever, and we go to a restaurant and we order our food, and then we’re signing the check, and then the waiter comes over and says, ‘Oh my God, I love you on the show.’ And you go, ‘What?’ I have to review everything that I just said,” Clifton explained. “Now I spiral into this paranoid, self-critical cesspool, because we don’t know who knows who we are and who doesn’t, and it’s actually reasonable to assume all the time, by default, that nobody knows who you are. That’s the reasonable thing to assume. But then every once in a while, you get caught off guard.”
Watch the full episode below.
