When Digest sat down with GENERAL HOSPITAL’s Julie Marie Berman (Lulu) for her recent feature, we compared her life now to when she first started back in 2005. Here, we continue that chat….
Soap Opera Digest: When you joined GH, your then-beau, now husband Mike didn’t watch your love scenes. What about now?
Julie Marie Berman: He totally doesn’t watch at all, but in all fairness, he doesn’t really watch the show. I’ll tell him when there’s something really funny that we did or something that I worked really hard on. Then, he’ll want to watch, but he’s at work when the show airs, so it would be like us sitting down at dinner re-watching my episodes together, and that totally defeats the idea that when I come home, I just want to be Julie and not think about work. Besides, he knows all the actors as themselves, not their characters.
Digest: Over the years, you were busy juggling school and work, then work with planning a wedding. What are you juggling now?
Berman: Right now, nothing other than GH. I was looking at other projects earlier [this year] and now I have such strong story coming through and I’m working a lot, which is great. So, most of my life is now back at GENERAL HOSPITAL.
Digest: This spring, you did a pilot called 22. What was that about?
Berman: It’s about four college guys and their experiences with relationships and college life in general. It was a fantastic script produced by Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla. I played the psycho girlfriend of one of the guys, which was so much fun. There’s always a chance it could get picked up at some point, maybe it just wasn’t the right time. I’m not quite sure what happened to it but maybe one day we’ll see it.
Digest: On a different topic, there seem to be more gay characters in daytime than ever before. In 2006, GH had Lucas but after a bold start, the story just fizzled. Do you think Lucas should come back?
Berman: Of course. I’m sure there’s something in the back of [the writers’] minds to bring that up when they aren’t surprising us with Jonathan Jackson [Lucky] and James Franco [Franco], but yeah, I was pretty disappointed when the story just fell flat, for whatever reason.
Digest: Speaking of, did you have any advice for the GH newcomer, Mr. Franco?
Berman: Oh, my God, I would never presume. I never tell actors how to do anything. I’m not a director. I’m an actor and I have my style and other people have their styles. He’s very talented.
Digest: Think he can handle 40-50 pages in day?
Berman: I’m sure he’ll do fine.
