Many of today’s best actors got their first taste of success on daytime dramas. Closer reveals which stars started out on popular soap operas.
Alec Baldwin: “You don’t care if it’s a soap, if you’re working with somebody who’s great, everything goes up,” Alec Baldwin said on The Story of Soaps. He felt fortunate to be cast as hunky villain Billy Aldrich on The Doctors in 1980, Leonardo DiCaprio
In one of his first roles, Leonardo DiCaprio played a young Mason Capwell in a 1990 flashback episode of Santa Barbara. “I went to drama class in junior high and high school,” he told CBS Sunday Morning. “But I never had any sort of formal training.”
Tom Selleck: From 1974 to 1976, a pre-mustache Tom Selleck played Jed Andrews on The Young and the Restless. “I’d never taken an acting class. I had no training, no desire,” he told People. “I just wanted to get a job and work.”
Tommy Lee Jones: Dr. Mark Toland, Tommy Lee Jones’ character on One Life to Live, became a bad guy overnight. “Because I quit,” said Tommy, who left in 1975. “They had ten show days to villainize the charac
Brad Pitt: Brad Pitt made his daytime TV debut in 1987. “I did a few weeks on Another World,” he told the teen magazine Tiger Beat. “I had to go to New York for that, and I had never been there.”
Laurence Fishburne: He originated the character of Josh Hall on One Life to Live and played him from 1973 to 1976. Laurence Fishburne even kept his soap opera credit on his resume after he received an Oscar nomination for his role in What’s Love Got to Do with It. “Hey … work is work!” he said in 2011.
Morgan Freeman: “The first time I ever thought about becoming a professional actor was when I was fifteen,” said Morgan Freeman, who paid his bills in the 1980s with stints on Ryan’s Hope and Another World.
James Earl Jones: In the 1960s, James Earl Jones became one of the first Black actors on daytime television. He played Dr. Jerry Turner on As the World Turns and Jim Frazier on The Guiding Light. “To be a part of good storytelling — the goal was about that,” he said. “And nothing threw me off, neither poverty nor discouragement.”
Kathleen Turner: “My character was so incredibly dumb that at a certain point I just couldn’t figure out how to justify the words that came out of her mouth, so I just asked the writers to make her a drunk,” Kathleen Turner said in Acting: Conversations about Film, Television, and Theater about her 1978 role on The Doctors.
Angela Bassett: “When I was first starting out, I never got the job, but I always got a callback, which was enough to [make me] hang in there,” Angela Bassett told Backstage. She won the role of social worker Leonie Peach on Ryan’s Hope in 1987.
Kevin Bacon: In 1980, Kevin Bacon was hired for an 11-show arc playing Tim Werner on Guiding Light. “I wasn’t one of those actors who just knew they were going to make it,” Kevin admitted in an interview with The Guardian. “I had to work really hard for every opportunity.”
