I remember one episode revolving around one of Sami’s “non-weddings” to Austin, and I had a huge two-page monologue to memorize, where Sami pleads with Austin not to tell her family about the terrible things she had done that made Austin want to break up with her before reaching the altar. In the script, Sami recaps the difficult life she has led in a plea for sympathy from Austin, and in hopes that he and her family would not judge her too harshly.
I memorized this entire two-page monologue (not to mention the rest of the episode, which had plenty of Sami dialogue), and when I arrived on the set on Monday to shoot the scene, Drake Hogestyn told me, “I’m sorry, Ali, this script is all wrong—you can’t say some of these lines because that’s not what happened. This isn’t what took place in Sami’s childhood on the show.”
Well, I wasn’t on Days when my character was a little kid, and there had been some very complicated story lines that were there before my time. Drake was around for those early episodes, and so he made a lot of suggestions for revisions.
We were so grateful that Drake had caught these errors. But after spending the entire weekend memorizing my monologue, I had about ten minutes to change gears and memorize the hurriedly revised script! To make my task even more difficult, I was just memorizing words, and had no visual context to put them in. In general, to help me learn my lines, I can usually call on Days scenes that I remember from the past, and I can use them to assist me in committing the new lines to memory. But this new task was a real challenge. Eventually, it was mission accomplished, but it wasn’t easy!
At times, mistakes do slip by everyone—except the fans, that is. One year at Christmas, Sami had a line where she said, “I hate egg nog!” Well, in a scene the following year, I carried some egg nog and poured it into a glass in the background of a scene. And leave it to our fans! I got a letter from a viewer who remembered that Sami hated egg nog! I guess our fans are our ultimate fact-checkers.
I know that I’ll never lose sight of the fans and how important they are to the success of the show. Yes, we often work very hard and very long hours. But none of us has anything to complain about. It’s a great job, and it’s so wonderful being part of the lives of our millions of viewers five days a week. I’m a very lucky person—and I know it.
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Copyright © 2004 by Alison Sweeney
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ISBN: 978-0-7582-6748-1
1. You might be wondering why I refer to Sami in the third person throughout this book. Sami is a huge part of my life, and I love playing her. But Sami is her own person, and she and I are not one in the same. If you know her through the show, you’ll understand why I keep her separate in my own mind.
2. This process is known as dry-blocking. “Blocking” is the technical term for the physical moves the director gives you during a scene, and “dry” because it’s just the actors and the directors—no cameras.
3. No actresses were injured in the shooting of this scene.
All The Days Of My Life (so Far) Page 23