In the ’90s, Linda Dona was the quintessential soap witch and when her conniving Nancy Eckert (wife of Anthony Geary‘s Bill, Luke’s look-alike cousin) was murdered, it kicked off one of GH’s most popular murder mysteries. The actress dropped out of the spotlight for nearly a decade but the bitch is back, currently playing a sadistic warden in the soon-to-be cult classic women-in-prison flick, Sugar Boxx.
“Yes, Sugar Boxx, with two Xs,” says Dona. “It’s a really fun throwback all those great 70s films. It even has a few of the [cult director] Russ Meyer stars in it. When I was hired, the director said, ‘Think Coffy and Foxy Brown.’ I really had to explore what could have possibly go wrong in this woman’s life to make her this warped [laughs].”
Sugar Boxx had a limited theatrical release at the end of 2009, which included a midnight movie premiere in Los Angeles. “Kicking it off at midnight was a blast,” Dona smiles. “People enjoyed it so much, we didn’t get out of there until 4 a.m. I had several people come up to me to talk about the film and they’d go, ‘Nancy!’ After all these years! To this day I still get recognized the most from Ricochet and GENERAL HOSPITAL. I must say, working with Tony [Luke/ex-Bill], Kin Shriner [ex-Scott, et al] and Lynn Herring [ex-Lucy, et al], those were great days.”
During her time off from Hollywood, “I traveled through Europe, and visited family in Italy for an extended period. Then I had a really bad bicycle accident. I’d gotten into biking after doing this wonderful bike trip through France and on my return to the States, I had an accident and was hospitalized for a month and then bedridden for another two. I had to go through a lot of physical therapy to heal. But I must say, I liked being in the real world.”
Having satisfied her itch to get back in the game, would Dona ever come back to daytime? “Sure,” she says. “I’d love to explore that possibility and see if you can go home again. I’d also love to do more theater. That’s where I started acting and I’d love to get back to those roots. It’s been a long journey but a fascinating one. I enjoyed my time away, but I love being back in the creative environment.”
There’s Something About Linda
Digest spoke with “guerrilla filmmaker,” director Cody Jarrett, about how Dona landed the role of sadistic Warden Beverly Buckner in Sugar Boxx:“This is not The English Patient and it’s not trying to be,” Jarrett states. “What makes midnight movies work is you cannot be in on the joke. So many people who came in to read misinterpreted that. You need to treat it like you’re doing Shakespeare and give it that intensity, and most of the people who came in for the warden had this camp element to what they were doing. Linda had the most searing and focused intensity. She was extremely frightening as the warden. As a matter of fact, when she came back, Linda told one of the readers, ‘Crawl to me,’ and the reader was on the floor crawling for Linda! It was unbelievable. She scared the reader so much that the reader did exactly what Linda said. It was chilling. That’s when we knew we had our warden.”
Sugar Boxx is currently playing On Demand. A DVD release is expected in the coming months, followed by a cable TV release this summer. For more information, check out www.sugarboxx.com.
