If
Guiding Light finds a new home after it leaves CBS it’ll be without half of Otalia, the soap’s sizzling girl-girl duo. Emmy winner Crystal Chappell, who plays late-in-life-lesbian Olivia Spencer, has signed a deal to return to NBC’s
Days of Our Lives as Carly Manning, a role she played to great popularity in the early ’90s (and, famously, got buried alive!). Chappell will start taping
Days in September and hit the air in October. She gave
TV Guide Magazine the exclusive lowdown on her surprising soap switch.
This is hot, head-exploding news — it’s shocking and crazy and terrific! Who imagined this would be your next career move!Not me! I sure didn’t expect this at all but it’s very exciting. I was in L.A. a couple of weeks ago and had some meetings set up to discuss the future. [
Days exec producer] Gary Tomlin called and asked if I’d be interested in coming back. We had lunch and, a week or so later, we had a deal. My kids have been asking me for a year, “When are we gonna move back to California?” So they’re very excited. It’s the show where their mommy and daddy met. [
Chappell is married to Michael Sabatino, who played Carly’s husband, Lawrence Alamain.]
So can daddy be far behind?Well, he’s coming with me to California.
I mean, can he be far behind in Salem? Will we see an on-screen reunion with Carly and Lawrence?I have no idea. I have no idea about
anything except that I’m going back. Gary and I didn’t talk story.
Surely, Carly will make a beeline for her ex-lover Bo Brady [Peter Reckell]!It’s been 16 years since I played Carly and she is probably a very different person now. It’s an opportunity to go back and reestablish something, and at the same time reinvent it. I look back at
Days as an experience that was lovely and romantic but also, because it was my first big job, the whole thing was overwhelming, actually. I’m older and wiser now and I’m looking forward to going back and giving it another shot. This happened so quickly that I’m reeling. My head and my heart are still with
GL right now. I ’m still
here! We’re shooting until the first week of August. The day the
Days deal was finalized was the day of our last cast photo at
GL, so it was kind of weird. And of course I couldn’t say anything about the new job.
If there’s no future for GL — and at this point it doesn’t look good — the Otalia fans are going to have mixed feelings about this. Sure, they’ll be able to follow you to Days but I think a lot of them were hoping — hell, so was I — that you two might move over to As The World Turns. Your story brought a lot of new, non-soap viewers to GL, and there’s big value there. Hell, there oughta be a GL spinoff based around Otalia and really give the people what they want — it could be called The G-L Word. Admit it, it’s not a bad idea.It’s not a bad idea at
all. I would gladly have done it. It was definitely something we were rallying for. I mentioned it to all the right people. But it was somebody else’s decision. It’s out of my hands. Otalia has certainly had too short of a life. I so love this storyline. In fact, I’m creating a Web series that has a similar energy to it — different from Otalia but similar. I believe there’s another kind of story to be told in this arena. People are ready and OK — well, for the most part — with watching a woman be who she is, and fall in love with another woman. I’ve gotten so much response from fans all over the world who are grateful that
GL has told this story, because they haven’t seen it before with two women. Two men maybe, but not two women. I think we showed that there’s a real niche, a real market for this sort of thing. Clearly, the time has come.