Carla Gugino’s Soap Opera Role Set-Up Her Career

The Big Picture

• Carla Gugino credits her early days as a soap star and theatrical background for building the foundation of her career.
• Gugino finds the process of memorizing lines and understanding her character’s thoughts to be the most tedious part of acting.
• Gugino enjoys collaborating with other performers, as the magic of a scene comes from everyone being at the top of their game.

In the entertainment world, there’s one type of TV show that’s as certain as death and taxes – soap operas. Numerous titles like Days of Our Lives have withstood the test of time, returning season after season for more unhinged yet enthralling storylines. For those working in the industry, it’s a non-stop job filled with constant line memorization and blocking with the high demand to crank out content on a daily basis. While it may be a high-stress job, it’s a dream one for those looking to break into the world of acting. This was certainly the case for Carla Gugino, who most recently appeared in Mike Flanagan’s horror miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher. During an installment of Collider’s Ladies Night with Perri Nemiroff, the actress revealed that she has her early days as a soap star and theatrical background to thank for building the foundation of her career.

“I did Falcon Crest, which was nighttime soap, for a year,” Gugino says of her ties to the soap opera industry. Though she has nothing but the utmost respect for the folks who have made it their lives to develop a career in the genre, Gugino says that it wasn’t something she was able to do, though she’s grateful for her experience. For the most part, it comes down to how her brain understands and stores information.

“I think the tedious work for me is the actual work in which I write down my lines. I record stuff. I walk with it. It’s not like, ‘Oh, there’s no big deal.’ It really is. It’s also the way that I learn if I don’t understand the thought of a character, if I’m still sort of putting something on it, and I’m not coming from it organically, I won’t remember that line. And it’s like, ‘Oh, there’s a key here. There’s something I’m not understanding.’ So that’s, I would just say, the most homework part of it, where you’re like, ‘Oh, everybody else is on vacation, and I’m at home for three hours working on that stuff’… Which is why I’ve never liked doing procedurals, and I always really appreciate actors who can come in on the day of, get in the hair and makeup chair, and just sort of do it, and they’ve forgotten it by the afternoon. Like, it’s a really incredible skill. It’s just that I don’t memorize that way, I don’t process that way.”

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

Although she enjoys taking all the solo time needed to study and understand her character, Gugino admits that it’s when she’s going through the trenches with other performers that she feels most alive. While many of us recognize her from her roles in film and television, the actress also has a sprawling background in the teamwork-heavy artistry of theater, nodding to the copious amount of “table work” as one of the pillars of her craft.

“The fact that you just sit down before any of you ever get up, and you actually start to discuss text, and you generally have a dramaturge there who is also pulling up really interesting historical information that you can be researching and giving context that you may not have seen, that ended up being just such a welcome process… So that was super cool to be able to do with a group of people, because I think… getting to collaborate in whatever way, I feel like there’s that incredibly magic moment when you’re doing a take or a sequence and in film and certainly on stage, but you have every single person at the top of their game, and then there’s the magic that comes only from that, that you never create yourself. So that, for me, is just like heaven. That’s what I just crave so much.”

Like his other Netflix titles that have come before, Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher is a true masterpiece in intricately designed and executed character work with each performer bouncing off their scene partner to establish the magic that Gugino is referring to. You can stream the entire series now and catch Nemiroff’s full Ladies Night interview with Gugino below.

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