We Love Soaps had the opportunity to visit the new ONE LIFE TO LIFE set in Manhattan on February 16th and tour the new digs. During this time we spoke with several cast members about their current experience on the show, the big move, and reflections on their time in Llanview. Please enjoy this series of interviews.FARAH FATH ("Gigi Morasco")
We Love Soaps: I have loved your work for over ten years on soaps, from your very first day as Mimi on DAYS OF OUR LIVES to now. What’s that like to look back on your career in daytime and say that for the past ten years you have been on daytime?
Farah Fath: I think it’s a little trippy. It will never register with me. It will never register that I’m on television. If it did, then I would maybe have a different personality. Maybe I would be cocky, I don’t know. It will never register. It’s a dream come true. The fact that I ended up on my favorite show, which was DAYS—I went from watching it to getting a call to audition for it, to a week later being on the set with everyone I grew up with. It was unreal. They became my family. Now here I am on ONE TO LIVE, the soap my mother watched. So I’m making all parts of my family very happy.
We Love Soaps: After eight years of DAYS how did this role come about? You went from Mimi to Gigi.
Farah Fath: I talked to Ron Carlivati about that and I don’t think he realized that Mimi was my name on DAYS. He has a personal friend named Gigi. He named this character after his good friend that he went to school with. ABC Daytime actually had a big meeting about it. Is it too silly to name this character Gigi after I played Mimi for so long? At the end of the day they said who cares? Toward the end of my run on DAYS I knew I wanted to move to New York.
We Love Soaps: What made you want to move here?
Farah Fath: I was tired of Los Angeles. Although I now miss it. I miss the sushi, I miss the sun. I was still very young and I had my life there. It was routine, the same scenes all the time, same restaurants, same everything. I just wanted to experience something before I was too old to maybe move on. Before I got settled down with kids or whatever. I said, “Let’s just move.” I told my manager. He said, “Alright, let’s get you out there.” But I wanted to have a job of course. Brian Frons was more than great about it. I took a meeting with him and said, “If you have anything that opens up on ALL MY CHILDREN or ONE LIFE TO LIVE I would be honored and thrilled to do my best on one of your shows.” A few months later I was on the set working with Erika Slezak on my first day! Hello!
We Love Soaps: I loved those first scenes at Bon Jour Cafe. I was talking to January [LaVoy] earlier how it reminded me of “Alice,” which made you like the Flo character.
Farah Fath: It was such a fun way to enter the canvas. I’m really lucky.
We Love Soaps: Gigi recently fell into some cracked ice. How warm or cold was that water?
Farah Fath: When they brought in the tanks in the morning, the water was at 100 degrees. But they had no way of keeping it that warm because there are no heaters on stage. So they had it that warm to begin with, and over the course of the sixteen hour day it wouldn’t get cold. Something you might not know is that I had full body wetsuit on. It actually was very restricting, and it made me hotter than I was already was underneath all the layers because it’s thick. And, it made me float. I was supposed to go under [the ice]. You don’t see but I’ve got my hands under the plexus glass trying to get myself to drown. I had to literally push to drown. I thought, “Oh my God, this is not going to look good.” But I think I pulled it off. But if you pause it and watch it in slow motion you can see my arms trying to make myself drown. No kidding.
And Crystal [Hunt] had just as many problems as me. She had a quite a few scenes where she is bobbing up and down. They were tying weights on her. We had to wear the wetsuits not because of the cold water, because it wasn’t cold, but because the plexus glass that broke during the explosion. The plexus glass can actually slice your skin open so they had it for safety reasons. We begged not to have to wear them because it made a float. But they said, “You have to because if you cut yourself we’ll never forgive ourselves.” So that was that.
We Love Soaps: What would you like to see happen now for Gigi?
Farah Fath: I think she should realize that her sister lied about everything. I think she should investigate her parents’ death.
We Love Soaps: Right, that was just taken at face value.
Farah Fath: That was before Gigi knew her sister was psychotic.
We Love Soaps: Do you think they’re out there somewhere?
Farah Fath: I don’t buy that they both died in a car accident.
We Love Soaps: Do you keep in touch with Kirsten Storms or any of your DAYS costars?
Farah Fath: Yes and no. I’m terrible at keeping in touch, period. At least once or twice a year I catch up with them. I just had dinner with Jason Cook [Matt on GH] in the city a few weeks ago. Then I was just chatting with Kyle Brandt who played Philip for awhile. He just got engaged. So I do keep in touch. I don’t like talking on the phone as it is so I don’t really call, but we text once in awhile.
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Damon L. Jacobs is a Marriage Family Therapist practicing in New York City, and the author of "Absolutely Should-less: The Secret to Living the Stress-Free Life You Deserve". He is re-imagining a world without "shoulds" at www.shouldless.com.
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