Even as a fresh-faced kid, this future Oscar winner clearly had “it”: He only appeared in a single episode of Santa Barbara, as a young Mason Capwell in flashbacks, and yet he was nominated for Best Young Actor in a Daytime Series at the 1990 Youth in Film Awards.
Just a few years shy of her fateful visit to Dr. Frank N. Furter’s castle, the Oscar winner-to-be “went into soap operas and started to learn how to work with cameras,” she told Women’s Wear Daily in 2017. Specifically, she appeared on A World Apart, as disaster magnet Patrice Kahlman, and Search for Tomorrow, as murderous drifter Sarah Fairbanks.
Eons ago, before he needed a trophy case as big as a house to hold all of his awards, the then up-and-comer spent a year and a half on Another World as Roy Bingham, a Frame Construction worker who tried to build a life in Bay City with wife Henrietta.
The erstwhile Effie Trinket could’ve been a bona-fide soap star: Legend has it, Santa Barbara courted her, but she nixed the offer to continue her education. As a result, she only briefly passed through daytime, as an All My Children waitress who thought then-newbie Josh Duhamel’s Leo duPres was made to order.
The tabloid mainstay was just 10 when she spent a year as Amanda Cory’s daughter, Allie, on Another World. But even then, the adorable tyke was displaying the kinda charisma that would soon get her cast in her breakout role — well, roles — in 1998’s The Parent Trap.
Everyone knows that Michael B. Jordan played Jackson Montgomery’s adopted son, Reggie Porter, on All My Children. But how many of you recall that he was briefly preceded in the role by his future Black Panther co-star, who told GQ, “I saw the stereotype” in the part, “so moving forward, I was like, ‘Nah, those are the roles I don’t want to play.”
In a Kidd Nation interview, Frozen II reindeer enthusiast Ryder (the son of Three’s Company’s John Ritter) admitted that during his extremely short stint as Todd on Days of our Lives in 1999, he’d broken the cardinal rule of soaps: He’d forgotten to do the tag look at the end of his scene!
Considering that he wrapped a 16-year run on Grey’s Anatomy in 2020, endurance doesn’t seem to be a problem for this former Calvin Klein model. But back in 1995, he lasted only a few weeks in his first big TV role, that of Michael Hudson’s long-lost son, Nick, on Another World.
Nearly three decades ago, when she was still on her way to becoming a Grammy-winning recording artist, the Fugee-in-the-making appeared on As the World Turns as Kira Johnson, a troubled teen — is there any other kind? — who lobbed accusations of impropriety at Duncan McKechnie.
When the future Deadpool star was just a tween beginning his illustrious showbiz career, he played baby-faced Billy Simpson on the Nickelodeon sudser Fifteen — or, as he’s called it, “a really horrible soap opera…that stoned college kids kept on the air for three years.”
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