Eva La Rue remains a fan favorite for playing Maria Santos Grey on ALL MY CHILDREN (1992-'98 and 2002-'05). She returns this week for the show's 40th anniversary episodes, and you can catch our interview about it in Soap Opera Weekly's Jan. 12 issue, on sale now. She also spoke about her prime-time gig as Natalia on CSI: MIAMI.

Soap Opera Weekly: Prime time vs. daytime. Similarities? Differences? Likes? Dislikes? The workload is very different.
Eva La Rue: Yeah. The schedule is much different here at CSI, and the amount of memorization, too, of course. Although it's a different kind of memorization. The tough thing about working on a procedural show is all of the scientific dialogue. I find that way harder to memorize than 50 pages of emotional dialogue.

Weekly: Not a medical techie, eh?
La Rue: Yeah, all that tech stuff just totally freaks me out — makes me crazy!

Weekly: So that's not your favorite thing about Natalia?
La Rue: [laughing] Noooooo. Uh-uh.

Weekly: What is your favorite thing about Natalia?
La Rue: I like her working relationship with the other people that she bounces off, especially Jonathan Togo's character, Ryan Wolfe — he's probably my favorite person. For whatever reason, [our characters] end up getting more "acting scenes" together. I love working with everybody else, too, but I get more of my "science scenes" with everybody else.

Weekly: Was it hard, once again, to come into a cast that was already set and make your mark?
La Rue: I was a little bit more afraid with this show. But this is just an awesome group of people. It's almost a shame that we are doing a procedural drama, because everybody has such an awesome sense of humor. They are so funny that we really should be doing CSI: THE SITCOM, or a single-camera comedy [laughs]. It's a funny, sweet, welcoming group.

Weekly: Maybe you should suggest it to the producers...
La Rue: Yeah [laughs]! I've already suggested a musical version, but they didn't think that was funny.

Weekly: Perhaps a zombie version, in which the corpses you're working on reanimate?
La Rue: [laughs] Or a vampire version? Why not? Everybody else is doing it!

Weekly: CSI: MIAMI puts personal lives on the back burner, which is the exact opposite of a soap. Has that been easy? Does Natalia have a love interest?
La Rue: No, she doesn't have one right now, which is kind of sad.

Weekly: Do you want her to get a personal storyline?
La Rue: Yeah, I do. I have one going on right now, since [a December] episode when Natalia went into a crime scene — which ended up being a meth lab — and the meth lab exploded. The decibel level of the explosion was so high that she ends up with hearing issues, and that [continued] into the next couple of episodes. Natalia's trying to deal with that, and there's a possible backstory tied into that. So I've had a little more emotional character work, which has been fun.