Howard Wise/jpistudios.com
For soap veteran Christopher Cousins (ex-Dr. Kirk, GH; ex-Cain, One Life To Live; ex-Colin, As The World Turns; ex-Greg, Another World), landing the role of psychiatrist Alan Laurent, on Young And Restless was a case of perfect timing.
“I’ve got a lot of personal stuff to tend to in Los Angeles,” the actor explains. “My kids are moving out of the house. My daughter is 21 and she had moved back in with me for her junior year in college and my son is 17 and will be going off to college soon, so once they’re gone we’ll sell the house and I’ll find a place in the mountains. I basically told my agents that I can’t really leave town for the summer and so this [Y&R] job fell in my lap. I’m very grateful.”
Although Cousins grew up in Oklahoma, he has been continuously hired for movies and TV to play English characters because his British accent is impeccable. “I’ve always been able to do that, my sister can, too,” he notes. “She can go to any town or country in the world and imitate their [native] accent like a myna bird. We just have an ear for accents. Maybe it’s just the way I look but for some reason, I was always getting cast as European in general back in the ’80s and ’90s. In fact, I’ve lost two jobs because they thought my American accent was weak and believed I was a Brit pretending to be American.”
No dialect was needed for Cousins to portray the Y&R shrink. “I thought that meant I’d be playing a French man but it turned out that he’s an American living in Paris,” he points out. “I come to Genoa City to help my friend Ashley.”
Which is a relief to a lot of Y&R fans who first suspected that Alan was really Ashley’s pretend friend with a PhD in order to get her family to stop worrying about her. “He really does exist,” Cousins chuckles. “He’s a very thoughtful person who really cares about Ashley, so he’s a good guy but the way I play it is that he has feelings for her but he suppresses those feelings so they don’t get in the way. He thinks he’s coming to give a friend emotional support after a very terrible break-up and doesn’t know he’s walking into a situation of her different alters.”
Working with Ashley’s portrayer, Eileen Davidson is “amazing,” crows Cousins. “There are so many ways you can get into trouble as an actor with these kinds of stories because you could easily spill over into cartoon land with this kind of stuff that she’s doing but Eileen navigates it beautifully. She plays it so well and in our first scene, I felt like I had known her for 20 years. We ribbed each other and I felt so relaxed because she’s so down to earth.”
Cousins has the same sentiments about Beth Maitland (Traci) and Peter Bergman (Jack). “Beth is fantastic,” he enthuses. “I already love her to death and I hope I get to do more stuff with her. And Peter is just a lovely man. In fact, everyone’s so welcoming and that made me feel very welcomed, and there’s no weird drama on the set, no b.s., and no egos. It’s just a really great place to work.”
Memorizing all those lines again was daunting at first. “I haven’t done it in a while so I was a little bit nervous at first, but then you just get it,” he shares. “But I will say last week, I had a lot of dialogue and I was glad they warned me, ‘You should look at this stuff a little bit early.’ That was very challenging, but the great thing is that everybody’s on your side and supporting you, which is nice. Also, on World Turns and One Life, I was used to working 12-hour days, so I’m almost embarrassed to say this but there are days when I come into Y&R at 7 in the morning and I’m leaving at 10. It’s a great schedule. They’re crazy efficient and everybody is on their game. Everyone does their work and has fun while they’re doing it, which is a great combo.”
Which is why Cousin expresses regret about his attitude during his early soap days. “I’ll be honest, I don’t really remember much about World Turns because I had a drinking problem in my 20s,” he admits. “Luckily, I quit when I was on One Life and straightened myself out. However, most of the time I was on that show, I was trying to figure out how to get out of my contract so I could get into primetime. In the beginning, it was so much fun, especially when I was doing all these different characters and I was just having a great time. But then I lost a couple [of outside] opportunities because of my contract and when Karen Witter [ex-Tina] left, I was like, ‘Come on, you gotta let me go’ and they did but they were really unhappy with me.”
Now Cousins has amassed quite a resume of TV and movie credits but is appreciative to be back in daytime. He concludes, “So far, Y&R has been a very positive experience and I’m really enjoying myself. I hope soap fans will like what I’m doing.”
Devin Owens
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