"It's confusing sometimes," Ben Masters admits of playing relapsed Julian, who is lighter on the humor than the Bad Julian we remember. "It can be like hammering a nail through a concrete wall, because if you just play the simplest line between two points and don't add something to give it some humanity, it doesn't work as well as it should. Part of our job is to not just stand there on the sidelines like an idiot. Well, most of us try not to do that. Some of us don't have much success!"

Ever the critic, Masters maintains that even he drops the ball sometimes. Case in point, he was less than thrilled with his scenes where Julian tried to rape Eve in December. "I watched it with Tracey (Ross, Eve) and I said to her, "I was terrible in that! It was just hideous. The drunken stuff wasn't working right. I wish someone had kept a better eye on me,'" Masters recalls, but Ross responded like a typical Evian (Eve and Julian) fan. "She said, 'How can you play that you're going to rape a woman on a lawn chair outside in the middle of winter in Maine at a wedding reception when you've been in love with her your whole life?!'"

Things went better when Julian trumped Theresa on the wharf, outbidding her to buy JT's silence. "I hadn't worked for two weeks and didn't work for two weeks after. I'd never met JT, didn't know where he came from, didn't know how I got that satchel of money and didn't even ask anybody," Masters says with a laugh. "I just played it the way I wanted to, because I love working with Lindsay (Hartley), and I was happy with how that turned out."

Until Julian lands on solid ground, Masters has a plan. "A lot of times, I try to look at each show as something that stands on its own," he explains. "Nothing preceded it and nothing will succeed it. It's just the show I'm doing today."