Soap Opera Weekly, 06/15/99
About Face

David Andrew Macdonald found his part on AW so illuminating, he decided to tackle another daytime role.

By Laura Fissinger
Photography by Robert Milazzo

Once upon a time, there lived a profile story on David Andrew Macdonald's adventures in his first daytime role. He's an intriguing, slightly off-center guy, and he had lots to say about playing the miles-from-center dual roles of Jordan Stark and David Halliday on Another World. Then AW was canceled, and Macdonald gave a post-mortem interview on the show, his characters and how he'd enjoyed doing daytime even more than he'd anticipated. Initially, after departing Bay City the actor planned on a vacation with his wife, Nikki, a writer, which he hoped to follow with a "fun (stage) play" to do for the summer while waiting for TV-audition season to come back around. But another plot twist was hot on Macdonald's heels. "In late April, I got a call from the casting director at Guiding Light, Glenn Daniels," who mentioned a role he thought Macdonald might be right for. "But they were looking for someone with a fully authentic English accent. I said that's fine, I understand, but bear in mind that the majority of roles I've ever played have been British gentlemen, and that my father was a Brit, and I've got a pretty good upper-class British accent."

The role is Prince Edmund, "the younger brother of some king of some country," Macdonald says. Naturally, our brainy highness is "out to get the throne." The audition lasted about five minutes, he says. He pulled out the accent, uppered the crust, and read with Daniels. GL executive producer Paul Rauch was the only other person in the room. "I auditioned at around 11:25, and then I went off to grab some breakfast. I called my machine afterward and there was a message from my agent; he left it about 10 or 15 minutes after I actually read. So I find out I've gotten the part at 11:39 - which is fabulous. I thought to myself, 'I guess they liked my accent,'" he adds with a laugh, relaxed and relieved. "I'm not taking any of this for granted, at all! I very much enjoyed my experience at Another World, and I wanted to stay in New York" while keeping his hand in daytime drama. "And I've heard that Guiding Light is a really good group of people." He'll be joining the group "sometime around mid-June." In the meantime, there's the vacation with Nikki, albeit a condensed version. "Now it'll have to be more like a long weekend."

Jordan's attempt to reach the spirit of his truelove, Amalie, put him at odds with the Cory family

Jordan disguised himself as David to get closer to Amanda.

Before that can happen, though, Macdonald will finish out his time on AW with grace, style and humor. "Right now, I think everyone has the same approach - to make the final shows every bit as good as we've tried to make every other show, and to handle all of this with a great amount of dignity," he says, adding that's the least due to the show. "The thing that really saddened me was the 35 years of television history which went down the pipes. Yes, shows die. But history is one of the most important things about soap opera. It's a damn shame that we were kicked off the air and are being replaced by a show with no history at all. I don't think there's another soap in the country with fans as loyal as those of Another World."

It took less than a week for Macdonald to fall in love with his wife, Nikki.   After graduating from high school, Macdonald realized he wanted a stage career.

With two soap roles under his belt in just one year, Macdonald is trying to make up for lost time. "I was middle-aged when I was 21," the actor says with his trademark good humor. "So now I've sort of been getting younger as I'm getting older. "I heard it put very well: Middle age is defined by those who stop looking for information and start looking for confirmation." During adolescence and his early 20s, "I thought I knew a whole lot about life and acting." Regarding the latter, "I was looking for confirmation, for people to say, 'Hey, you're great!'" After a couple of postcollege years doing pay-the-rent jobs and too little stage work, Macdonald realized, "'There isn't a whole lot that I do know.'" In an effort to remedy that, he decided to enter a theater training program, and at age 26 was accepted by Juilliard's drama division. The school didn't earn world-wide prestige by telling students how great they are, however. "It's a very stripping process of learning there, emotionally and intellectually," he notes. "Which is a good thing. It really humbled me and dummied me down - or dummied me up, actually. At Juilliard you get rid of the personage you've created to present to the world." After attending a school with specific programs keyed to his problem, Macdonald returned to "normal" school in the fourth grade, ready and eager, but keenly aware "that unless I had my face to the grindstone my entire life, I would probably never accomplish academically as easily as other people would." He became very accomplished, in fact. Still, good grades and plenty of good friends didn't do the trick, not completely. Macdonald laughs, describing the kid he was, walking around with tomes by the likes of philosophers Descartes and Kant "sticking out of my jacket pocket just enough so people could see I was reading them. Please! What a Philistine! I mean, I was interested in all that stuff, but I think I put on a lot of trappings of sort of 'the removed intellectual,' because I always felt second place." Intellectual pursuits aside, since the rousing response to a ninth grade singing/acting debut, Macdonald has known that either opera or stage acting would be his career choice. "My parents were great about it all along. I took voice lessons, opera lessons. It was, 'Whatever you want to do in life is good by us.' Later, when I told them I was going into the performing arts, they were actually relieved. They said, 'We were so sure you wanted to be a lawyer, because you talk just like one.'"

In 1991, following his graduation from Juilliard, a revved-up Macdonald began both his delayed youth and his new career. "We finished our last stage production on a Sunday, and on the following Tuesday I had to be in Philadelphia for a theater role." The jobs continued. Even with the hectic schedule of live theater Macdonald always managed to grab family time. Before a summer '92 visit, his mom started raving about his sister Ruth's new nanny, and how David simply had to meet her. "My mother swears she didn't, but essentially, she pimped for Nikki and me," the actor recalls with a bad-boy grin. "I came sweeping in from regional theater, and here is what looks like a 15-year-old kid. I'm like, 'Mom, what are you doing?' But Nikki was 22 at the time. Anyway, I was only there for six days and we were already in love by the time I left." They married "about a year and four months after we first met. It was a long-distance relationship the whole time - she lived in Washington, D.C., I was based in New York. We didn't live together until we were married." Nicolette now holds a master's degree in literature and poetry; she's written a couple of plays for Macdonald's young troupe, the About Face Theater Company.

A young Macdonald looks about to beg: "Please, sir, may I have some more?"

Coincidentally, one of Macdonald's earliest post-Juilliard credits came from AW: "I played a football captain trying to break up Jenna and Dean," he notes with a laugh. His résumé lists other brief serial drama appearances, on Swan's Crossing, One Life to Live, Loving and "five or six episodes on a soap opera for kids - I know, an oxymoron." Macdonald's agents understood that he wouldn't consider a contract role - being available for theater was priority one. During one theater job, however, he'd gotten to know Jimmy Bohr, AW's casting director, and they hit it off. So Macdonald listened when his agents phoned during a Maine family gathering. "They said, 'Please don't get mad at us, but Jimmy Bohr called and said there's this contract role on Another World that is tailor-made for you.' I looked at my family and said, 'Well, it is time to make the doughnuts. I've had a nice theatrical career since graduating from Juilliard,'" plus some film work and nighttime guest stints on Law & Order and HBO's Sex and the City.

Making the doughnuts meant no theater for a while; it also meant making a good, steady salary - and fleshing out a character ripe with possibility. "Jordan was not a black-and-white villain; he did have a soul - it just got hidden beneath…," the sentence trails off into a chuckle. "There was a sci-fi element, yes, and there are those who say that Another World doesn't do sci-fi, or that it shouldn't. But I, quite frankly, think that a time-traveling, Byronesque, 18th century, hugely romantic figure is classic soap opera."
As for David Halliday, he was fun for Macdonald to play, with all the "physical comedy. Halliday was basically popped on me once I was already playing Stark," he says. "Chris Goutman (executive producer) came in to me and said, 'Explore another accent for this character.'" Macdonald's years of vocal training came in handy, "so the switch could be more casual. Stark's voice is farther back in the throat, and I allow a little English accent to come out. For Halliday, I lighten things up." The rich, rounded Stark voice rises into a slightly nasal, pinched, high tone as Macdonald talks: "It's a little Midwestern, ya know?"
It seems making the doughnuts is turning out to be more fun than Macdonald anticipated. "Oh, I'm having a ball," he says with a laugh. "No kidding. I'm learning so much, too, because I don't know the medium that well. The stage work I've done is paying off in terms of the pace we work at, but I'm still adapting to the fact that my 'world' is not a 40-foot stage. It's 18-inches wide sometimes. So certain scenes I think worked marvelously look like crap on tape because I didn't play a scene for the size of the space. That's entertaining, to educate myself about things like that."
For all the difficulties that dyslexia laid on Macdonald's lap, it never stood a chance to squelch the man's delight in teaching and learning. This interview resists the sincere efforts of two individuals - it simply won't stick to the questions list. Tangents bounce all over: his Scottish ancestors' "maniacal fascination" with family trees. Political history. Current headlines. Genetics. Height. Music. Jerry Falwell. Favorite vocabulary words and embarrassing mispronunciations. Oh, yes, and a helpful tip for those folks like him, whose brains and imaginations resist anything intended to slow them down. "I'm not disciplined enough to begin to learn meditation. So instead, my equivalent of getting whacked on the head was always sitting and watching The Simpsons. I could zone out, thinking it was brilliant and relaxing at the same time." Lately he's been catching bits and pieces of the proudly juvenile cartoon hit South Park. Macdonald likes it so far.
Not that work leaves him with much time to watch television. Doing a soap is not an easy gig, but at least Macdonald isn't afraid that he won't get confirmation, like he would have been at age 21. He doesn't need the world to tell him how great he is anymore.
"What I love are the friends who tell me the truth about my work, even more so if it's done with humor. This one playwright friend of mine, he's seen me in new plays that I've usually been in because I know the writer. And if he thinks it's bad he'll say, 'Very good work! I think if they pulled every tooth out of the writer's head, that would be justified. Yes, I think that would be justice.'"