Getting to Know Stephen Martines

Interview with Stephen Martines, formerly Nikolas Cassadine from General Hospital, and currently starring on Lifetime’s Monarch Cove

Nadine: Tell me about Monarch Cove.
Stephen: A woman named Bianca gets falsely accused of murdering her father and goes to prison for six years. She gets out of prison and goes back home to Monarch Cove to go about her life and start over and obviously that’s when more drama ensues and it becomes the traditional primetime soap opera—sex, love, scandal, etc.

Nadine: Tell me about your character.
Stephen: Parker is the guy that comes to town and I won’t necessarily say he destroys people’s lives anymore, because they kind of found a different direction, but he definitely stirred up a lot of trouble. He is definitely the, as you would call it, ship disturber. He is the rich guy from New Jersey. He runs the casino. He goes back to Monarch Cove in search of the family he never knew he had. Or shall I say that his father abandoned him.

Nadine: This is the first time you’re doing nighttime TV.
Stephen: Well, since Pacific Blue this is the first nighttime series I have done.

Nadine: Do you prefer nighttime TV to daytime TV.
Stephen: Its different I miss daytime for a lot of reasons.

Nadine: Name one.
Stephen: The stability is one of the most alluring things about daytime.

Nadine: Stability. Can you elaborate.
Stephen: The thing about daytime is you’re on contract, you get a weekly paycheck you know what you’re making per month and you have the ability to make more if they work you more. Those are the perks to it. And again you’ve got stability for three or four years if you’re on contract--If you are a vital source to the show. And the thing about daytime that I really miss is the amount of work that we do.

Nadine: Really? Daytime seems like it’s so grueling.
Stephen: Well it is grueling but I look at it this way—it’s probably one of the best training grounds that an actor could hope for. You’re going in knocking out twenty to thirty-five to fifty pages a day and you’re learning the ropes of what being an actor is all about. Whether you’re repeating yourself day in day out, that’s a whole different thing. That’s not really the issue. But when you’re sitting behind four cameras you learn a lot of technical things I think actors should learn. Just basic things like hitting your mark. You [also] get to work with a lot of different caliber of talent. Especially talent such as Tony Geary and Genie Francis and Stephen Nichols and people who are veterans - the Jackie Zeman - in this industry for twenty, thirty years and made a great living and great career out of it for themselves and I was fortunate enough in my run in daytime to be able to work with those types of people so I myself had learned quite a bit. With myself I was always referred to as the sponge. I took in as much as I could as fast as I could and in hopes that it would lead me in a different direction and who knows what’s gonna happen five or six years from now. This show came up. I took a little bit of time off and got back to L.A. and this was my first audition I had. I ended up booking it and it was a great experience. Being in Australia, I had a blast. I really enjoyed being, what I really enjoy most about primetime in my short experience in doing it is location. I love being on location. I think that was the most intriguing thing about it because it really allows you to kind of develop your character more. Even though we did utilize some of the studio space in Australia, we were on location the majority of the time and it’s neat to see the environment around you because you can kind of associate it with how your character would be or how you would be in real life so it was much easier than sitting in studio on a built set and trying to pretend. For instance just sitting in a bar allows you to really kind of play that environment and kind of use it in, I guess you could say, a method sort of way.

Nadine: Give me a concrete example of how you are able to use the physical environment for your character. He’s a rich guy from Jersey.
Stephen: Just a small thing. I had a Porsche. When I came to Monarch Cove, my entrance on the show was off of a twelve-seater Learjet. It was like really loud. For myself, I could never get that in a studio. When I walked off that plane I felt like that guy. Walking off the plane and hopping into my limo that was waiting for me and then I go to the mansion. Instead of pretending you’re in a mansion in a studio, you’re actually pulling up to it. It’s real to see. I think for me, it was nice to have that. It was a different touch from what I was used to so I think all actors prefer location shoots. It’s much more fun being out in the open and breathing the air and seeing the sun that it is to be under all those lights.

Nadine: That’s interesting that you would say that. I can see where you could feel more motivated in a setting like that but I’m wondering if it’s not a bit like cheating. Usually when actors talk about their best training ground or the ideal training ground, they talk about theater and there you have to really stretch yourself and pull up from deep within to create a character and to react to what the setting is supposed to be.
Stephen: I agree with that one hundred percent but I also look at it his way; it’s like being in a band onstage. You have to feed off of an audience and if the audience is involved and you’ve captured the audience then it’s a lot easier to maintain that focus. It’s a lot easier to stay in that moment. Having been onstage and done a lot of performing with a band, that’s my thing that’s what I thrive off of. That audience in front of me. I think the toughest thing for actors is theater it is a maximum training ground. And it allows you to really kind of be melodramatic because it works. You have to be big; you have to be over the top. The thing about film and television is that you’re not allowed to be really over the top especially in primetime. Because you are very confined within a space on camera.