The youngest DePaiva has been bitten by the proverbial acting bug. Ten-year-old JQ (son of Kassie and James, ONE LIFE TO LIVE’s Blair and ex-Max) makes his acting debut on ALL MY CHILDREN on Sept. 20, 21 and 24. Not OLTL? one may ask.
DePaiva’s casting has to do with AMC’s current storyline involving Spike’s deafness and how it affects Ryan, Kendall and Zach. JQ was born deaf, a situation that devastated Kassie and James at the time, much like it is devastating Ryan and Kendall on television now. When AMC decided to go with this story, head writers Barbara Esensten and James Harmon Brown did their homework and spoke with Kassie and James at length. So when they needed a child with a cochlear implant — which JQ has — to appear on Erica’s talk show, it wasn’t a tough role to cast.
“He is playing Jason, who is a 10-year-old deaf child who had the cochlear implant, very similar to JQ, except they have written him as a big jock, and JQ is so not a jock,” explains his very proud mother. “Susan (Lucci, Erica) and Alicia (Minshew, Kendall) and the whole production staff could not have been more gracious and lovely to our family. We walked into his dressing room and one of the associate producers called and asked if there was anything special that JQ needed, and that was very sweet. So Jimmy is like, ‘Oh, no, but if you had Shirley Temples there, he would love that.’ Well, that was a joke, and we walked in and there was a recipe for Shirley Temples and all of the ingredients. So I said, ‘JQ, do not get used to this! This is not real.’
“I am really happy about how the story has been executed. It will be a great service to the hearing community and the non-hearing community. People will be informed and they are going to do some PSAs for the League for the Hard of Hearing, which is my huge soapbox.
“After opening the script, I said, ‘JQ, do you realize you are working with the greatest and most popular daytime television star ever?’ ” DePaiva continued. “And he goes, ‘Really?’ He is with Susan and I’m going, ‘Oh, my God! Talk about pressure,’ ” she jokes.
JQ (and his parents) had a crisis of the technological kind during the taping. ‘His cochlear implant went out in a scene. I saw him take off his devices and his battery had gone out. So everyone was panicking, but he can hear with one side, which is one reason we went for bilateral cochlear implant surgery. So we just waited and I said, ‘Next time, you always carry your battery in your pocket.’ ”
The actress enthuses of her son’s experience, “He really enjoyed it. It was great. He was like, ‘Can I buy dinner tonight?’ and I said, ‘No, it’s okay.’ I was so proud of him. You just have no idea how hard that little boy has worked to get to that place in his life where he can really pull it off.”
DePaiva did have to remind him that “AMC is not ONE LIFE; you can’t talk to everybody. He goes up to everyone and says, ‘Hi, I’m JQ,’ introducing himself to everyone.” Of course, it’s not as if people at AMC didn’t know who JQ was, as his last name is DePaiva. “We were very lucky, because two out of the four cameramen were OLTL cameramen and two out the four boom operators were ONE LIFE folks, so there were four people that knew JQ. Not that we wanted to put our son into show business at all. Because I don’t truly believe that children should be doing this, but he is doing this at a very special moment in his life. I’m saying this and I am going to knock on wood. I hope that he is not bitten by this to where he is crazy and is like, ‘I gotta do this! I gotta do this; where can I do some more?!’ “
