Soap Opera Weekly, 1999
Gossip

Stark Razing

If you thought David Andrew Macdonald looked icky as Another World's Jordan Stark, you should have seen what was going on under the prosthetics: "At one point, my face had swollen up and I had open sores--it was awful," David says of the allergy he developed from the latex. "It itched, too, because my skin dried out and flaked off."
David's perseverance in playing the part despite the discomfort and temporary disfigurement prompts AW head writer Leah Laiman to call him "a darling, a real trouper, a great actor and a gorgeous human being, which everyone can see." Well, sure, now that Jordan Stark has been killed off and David Halliday has been reborn in a blob of ectoplasm. "Poor David," Leah says of the actor. "We get the latex off his face and he thinks he's finally going to get a fabulous part as a normal person, but first we had to cover his entire body with this pink, sticky, gooey slime. And he did it without complaint. He was wonderful."
GL's David Andrew Macdonald and Crystal Chappell: royal treatment?
Now David is going on to his next reward: After AW wraps, he's segueing onto Guiding Light in a new summer storyline in which he'll play Prince Edmund, second in line to the throne of the island country San Cristobel. And the only artifice he has to apply is an upper-class British accent. After auditioning some authentic Brits, they brought in Macdonald (who claims to "have quite a good upper-class English accent" ) to read for executive producer Paul Rauch. That was on a Monday. On Tuesday, the actor--who had been unflapped by running sores--continuously blew his lines in his scenes with Kim Rhodes (Cindy; she tries to seduce him in the episode, airing June 10), which were, incidentally, being directed by Larkin Malloy, (ex-Travis Montgomery, All My Children). "Poor Larkin! There were whole tracts of stuff I couldn't remember, I was so distracted by the whole Guiding Light thing. I was told not to tell anyone, and I didn't know who on the set knew."
But a couple of days later, when David participated in the Drive to Save Lives golf fund-raiser for the Bone Marrow Foundation at Chelsea Piers, he confided in Michael Sabatino (Peter, ATWT) that he'd just gotten the part of a prince on GL. Michael realized that David would be in the same storyline as his wife, Crystal Chappell.