Olivia and Johnny (Soaps.com)
Soaps.com recently had the chance to talk with Lisa and found out how she feels about life in Port Charles.
Soaps.com: Congratulations on being placed on contract with General Hospital.
Lisa LoCicero: Thank you very, very much.
Soaps.com: I’ve certainly enjoyed Olivia since you’ve brought her on to the show, but it seems like she’s really come into more of her own character lately, which has been nice.
Lisa: Well, yeah, absolutely. It is just now that Olivia is beginning to have her own storyline and not be a satellite to someone else’s story, which is sort of a nice way to be able to warm up into this kind of work, even though of course I’ve done it in the past, but you know, you get rusty pretty quick with that volume of material and the volume of material seems to increase exponentially as time goes on. I mean compared to what we did in a day on “The City” to what we do in a day on General Hospital, it's a lot of words. Olivia definitely is shifting into telling her own story on the canvas right now.
Soaps.com: Do you find playing her is much different now than when you first came on?
Lisa: She’s not quite as right out of the neighborhood as when I started, it’s not just that the hairdo is different and she wears different clothes slightly. It’s important when the character comes on to make an impact of who this person is in relation to the other characters, but then you sort of have to dial that back so that the character has some hope of blending and not just…the character can become a caricature if she stayed with the really thick accent and super duper long hair and gigantic earrings. We’ve toned down some of the, well I’ve chosen to tone down some of the more obvious aspects of Olivia on her first day. So there is a little bit of a difference in playing her, but the essential core of the character is the same.
Soaps.com: What do you enjoy most about Olivia?
Lisa: I love that she’s so direct and I know that can annoy a lot of people. She doesn’t mind giving everyone her opinion, which is very different from me in real life. So it’s really nice to be able to go to work and just tell it like it is to everyone, or at least tell it like she thinks it is to everyone.
I love working with all my co-stars, but I love the catfights with Claudia, which are a lot of fun to play because again, that’s something in real life that just is not in my personal human vernacular. It’s never going to happen! (laughs)
Soaps.com: That's probably true for most people, which is probably why they enjoy the character as well.
Lisa: Yeah, live vicariously through other people’s catfights.
Soaps.com: Exactly.
Lisa: And when Sarah (Brown, Claudia) and I are done with those scenes, we always like to giggle and give each other a hug.
Soaps.com: What did you think when you found out you were going to be paired up with Brandon Barash’s character Johnny?
Lisa: I’m not going to lie; when I first got the call, I was kind of shocked. I said, ‘Really? Johnny? (laughs) You’re kidding?’ Just because it seemed unusual not because it seemed unpleasant, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense in terms of the canvas and what it would do to the other characters in Port Charles and of course as I’ve said many times, Brandon is such a doll that I was thrilled to be able to be working with him and I love his work too.
Soaps.com: I’ve been trying to think, had you had many scenes or crossed paths with him prior to your characters getting involved?
Lisa: Never. On the canvas we had never been in the same room. We were always cracking each other up off set, but we’d never shared any screen time.
Soaps.com: You two definitely have great chemistry and it’s fun to watch the two of you together.
Lisa: Oh good. Yeah, we have a good time and it’s partly because we’re really comfortable with each other and there is something about love scenes. We both are in agreement on what the effect the Daytime love scene is meant to have on the viewer, which is, I guess you’re supposed to watch it and feel a little bit embarrassed, like, ‘I shouldn’t be seeing this.’ We kind of joked about that like, yeah, people should watch it and feel like, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t be watching this,’ for at least a moment and so that’s one of the things that we’ve thrown into the pot of actors’ work with love scenes.
Soaps.com: How do you feel about love scenes? Are they awkward for you or just part of the job at this point?
Lisa: I wouldn’t say they are awkward and it does have a lot to do with the person you’re working with because I have in my life done love scenes that were incredibly awkward and I would even go so far as to say, unpleasant. But when you really trust each other for those couple seconds, they don’t really last that long, for those couple seconds you just do it. You have to really kiss a person and just do it. I’m not talented enough to act like I’m kissing someone without kissing them. I apologize if that’s what I’m supposed to be doing. And then they cut and we go back to being the regular people that we were before.
Soaps.com: And now Olivia’s son has come on the scene, which has been long awaited. How will Dante affect her life in Port Charles?
Lisa: In every possible way. I’m trying to think of what people know at this point about him and not give too much away.
(Some discussion about what was currently airing ensued.)
His presence in town is terrifying on pretty much every level in terms of her relationship with Johnny, which she values more and more, and in terms of the secret she has devoted her life to keeping. Those two things alone are threatened by his being in town. I have heard people say, ‘What is she still doing in town? If she wants to keep the kid away from Sonny so badly, why is she there?’ I’ve sort of explored the idea that staying within the realm of Sonny’s activities, she can sort of keep him close and it would add to her ability to protect Dante from him.
Soaps.com: Kind of give her a little bit of control over the situation.
Lisa: A little bit. That’s not her whole reason for staying obviously. Let's face it, the reason she’s in town is, if she wasn’t in town she wouldn’t be on the show. (laughs) She’s gotta stay in town if she’s going to be on the show. [Dante] being in town threatens just about every level of Olivia’s current situation.
Soaps.com: How do you think Sonny and Dante will react when they eventually find out they are father and son?
Kate and Olivia (ABC)
Soaps.com: That’s usually the most interesting on soaps.
Lisa: Certainly, certainly. Yeah, I think she’s going to be doing some heavy lifting instead of just, ‘Here Jax. Here’s a few files for you.’
Soaps.com: Speaking of Jax, he and Olivia have a nice relationship and it’s pretty rare when characters of the opposite sex are left just as friends. Was there ever any discussion at any point about throwing the two of them together?
Lisa: I think whatever your feelings are about her moral failings, I think that her morality would certainly dictate that she not touch her friend’s husband or her boss. I think they dealt with that in an early episode where he was feeling bad about his relationship and was saying things like, ‘Go buy yourself a bikini and meet me in the pool,’ and Olivia was like, ‘Don’t even try it.’ We played out a few scenes with Olivia shutting him down on all levels and saying, ‘I know what you’re doing and don’t even try it with me just because you’re having a bad patch with your wife.’ That’s not something that Olivia would be very likely to do.
Soaps.com: Jax and Alexis have kept their relationship platonic and it’s nice to see another male/female relationship go that way.
Lisa: [Ingo Rademacher’s] so much fun to work with. It’s sort of impossible not to have some kind of chemistry with him because he’s got the "laser beamy" eyes, you know? (laughs) I do enjoy being his sounding board. I’m always happy when I see scenes on the lineup between the two of us.
Soaps.com: The spoilers are indicating Sonny will be giving Olivia the full court press.
Lisa: Yeah. I would have to say I was even surprised at how full court press it is. When I read the scenes at first, I thought, ‘Wow!’ It seems almost like something I’m not used to seeing Sonny do and it may be because they’ve got so much history that he feels he can be that honest with her or at least honest in terms of what he thinks he’s feeling. Of course, they’ve painted it out pretty well that he’s in a fairly unhappy place right now. A place of sort of quiet desperation, which is something you don’t get to see on soaps that much. You know, a character makes a certain batch of decisions and they’re just left with day-to-day unhappiness. That’s kind of hard to put on the screen, but I think it’s something most everyone can really relate to, much more so than, my shipment got blown up, or am I going to kill this Russian dude? You can relate to, I did A, B, C and D and now the result of that is I’m really unhappy. So Sonny is sort of going through that right now and I think he sees Olivia as something from a time when he was happier and as much as she gets in his face, he knows she accepts him on a certain level and he really feels the need of that and that maybe intensifies his feelings towards her.
Soaps.com: Do you think, despite her reservations about him, Olivia is truly in love with Sonny?
Lisa: I think her feelings for him are pretty deep, but as deep as they are, she’s also spent the better part of her life covering them up. It’s equal parts depth of feeling and strength of intention to not feel those feelings. So she’s in a pretty much unwinnable situation there, a sort of Herculean effort battle there. That’s going to be really something to play. I hope it can come across as she just can’t fall right into his arms. She would never do it, not just because no one would want to see that, but the character would just never do that after what she’s done to stay away from him.
Soaps.com: One of the good things about her is that she calls Sonny out on his crap and doesn’t overlook anything.
Lisa: Yeah. And as much, at least in my life, as much as you may hate that in the moment, when someone is calling you on your s**t, if you know that they really care for you and they have your best interests in mind and they have even a modicum of wisdom, when you walk away from that interaction, there’s usually some gratitude and that’s another thing I think Sonny feels.
Soaps.com: And will we see Kate coming back anytime soon?
Lisa: I have some scenes with her on [July 13]. They can’t leave that dangling. I think Kate and Olivia, I think that there’s a lot of material they could keep mining with those two.
Soaps.com: Especially with Dante being on now and Kate being the only one who knows.
Lisa: Except for Patrick Drake. Don’t forget.
Soaps.com: Oh, that’s right!
Lisa: I know. For me and Jason Thompson (Patrick), I was like, ‘You know, you know my secret,’ and he’s like, “I might just blackmail you. I’m just saying.’ (laughs) I think there’s room for a ton of story between Kate and Olivia that could be very interesting to watch and to play, so I’m hoping that happens.
It seemed like people really liked that wedding necklace stuff or at least it generated a lot of opinion whether people were like, ‘Olivia, shut your mouth. She doesn’t have to wear the necklace if she doesn't want to.’ Or, ‘Kate wear the damn necklace. That’s your family.’ It definitely sparked a lot of argument if nothing else and I think that history is setup nicely and could offer a lot of story.
Soaps.com: I also liked the scene where Kate found out about Olivia and Johnny and the cousins laughed about it. It showed they were still close and those are fun moments to watch.
Lisa: I hope that’s how they write it. The stuff on Monday, I think Megan (Ward, Kate) and I want to play it as, some of the stuff could be played either for the adversarial aspect, or the camaraderie, but you call each other on your s**t aspect and I think we go for that whenever possible. [To play], I’m this and you’re that and we don’t get along, is not that interesting.
Soaps.com: And it’s nice to see friendships and family relationships played between two women.
Lisa: I totally agree.
Soaps.com: So there’s a lot coming up for your character.
Lisa: Yes, indeed. It’s really a gift. They’re really treating Olivia really well.
- Lori Wilson
