IF THAT'S LOVE // Press Archive // Trevor St. John

Nice to Meet You (SOW 1/27/04)
Trevor St. John is having a blast as One Life to Live's new Todd. Just don't compare him to that "other guy"

WEEKLY: What was your big break?
ST. JOHN: The film Benny & Joon came to town [Spokane, Wa. where St. John was a student at Whitworth College] and I auditioned. The casting director said, "We don't have anything for you as far as a role, but you can be Aidan Quinn's stand-in." So as Aidan Quinn's stand-in I met people. I finished college and moved to Los Angeles and started working almost immediately.

WEEKLY: What kind of work did you do?
ST. JOHN: Mostly features. My first gig was playing a skinhead in Higher Learning, directed by John Singleton. And then I played Glenn Close's son in the made-for-tv movie Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story. I did Crimson Tide with Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman. I also played Kris Kristofferson's son in Payback, the Mel Gibson movie. I'm pretty good at playing sons.

WEEKLY: What was it like working with Mel Gibson and Glenn Close?
ST. JOHN: Working with Glenn Close was like studying acting at Yale for a semester. Actually, you didn't have to do any acting. She was so authentic that it made your job very easy. She was a very generous person. On a personal level too, she was very sweet and a pleasure to work with. Mel Gibson was terrific, too. He is a funny man and pleasant to be around. He is a good Scrabble player. We played Scrabble in the makeup room.

WEEKLY: Who won?
ST. JOHN: Guess? He did, of course.

WEEKLY: How did you meet your wife, Sara?
ST. JOHN: She was working in a coffee shop in Los Angeles. She just got off the boat from Sweden. So I got a lot of coffee and I wrote her poetry. That's how I got her interested.

WEEKLY: How did the OLTL role come about?
ST. JOHN: Soap operas are nice gigs. I never considered it before, because when I first started in L.A. there was no crossover. If you were a soap actor, you were a soap actor. If you were a model, you were a model. Now everything has so much cross-pollination that you can work in different venues. My agent said, "You should think about doing a soap." So I put myself out there.

WEEKLY: Was this your first soap audition?
ST. JOHN: No. I auditioned for the role of Kevin Buchanan, but they wanted to go about 10 years older.

WEEKLY: When you got the role, you didn't know you were going to be Todd, did you?
ST. JOHN: No. I knew shortly into it, a month or two.

WEEKLY: Todd is certainly a much more interesting character than Walker.
ST. JOHN: It's nice, because I had instant concrete relationships. There was so much history with Todd. I became a core character. It was grounding. I could look at old scripts and ask people, "What was your relationship with Todd like?" Whereas with Walker, no one knew. And of course that's what it's [acting] all about -- your relationship to people -- when you figure out how to play a scene.

WEEKLY: And you had the benefit of not being seen as a recast by the fans. That can be a big hurdle.
ST. JOHN: Yeah, that's true. The other thing that was nice about that is I could make the character more [my own], through pretending to be Walker. I understand that the man who [formerly] played the part [Roger Howarth] had trouble touching people. Todd didn't touch them. He wasn't even very warm to his own daughter. He played the same way in every scene with every person, just kind of grumpy. I thought, "Well, that's not very interesting. Since I'm playing this and pretending to be somebody else I can discover what those things are like again." So I said, "I'll use this guise of Walker to discover life and be able to touch people again and be warm with my daughter." Whether that sustains itself we'll see.

WEEKLY: How do you feel when people compare you to Roger Howarth's Todd?
ST. JOHN: It's like saying that if you play Hamlet, every actor who plays it has to play each line with the same inflection, the same intention. I don't care what the other guy did. That's his time. Those are the characteristics that Todd had simply because he was the only one who played it. As far as I'm concerned, it's just a name and words on a page. What I do after that is up to me. I'm playing it now. I know that sounds very arrogant and over-confident, but it would be no fun to try to mimic somebody.