Interview with "Desperate Housewives"' Tuc Watkins

AE: I didn’t think so either. But talking to people at the TCA — writers, directors — said this issue still comes up and I was surprised.
TW: You can’t make a blanket statement about everyone in general, but I don’t personally see that going on nearly as much. I’m sure people don’t want to play, you know, drug dealers to give the wrong impression about who they are. And a lot of daytime audiences like to see their characters sweet and kind and pretty and all that, but we as actors don’t like to do that. We want to play all sorts of different things.

AE: Right now you’re also playing David Vickers on One Life to Live?
TW: Yeah, so during the day I’m playing the Lothario David Vickers, who’s been married four times and trying to have sex with all the women that he hasn’t been married to on One Life to Live, and at night I play Bob, who just has the one boyfriend.

AE: Is there anything you can tell us about David’s storyline, anything that our readers might be interested in?
TW: Well, it turns out that David Vickers is heir to the patriarch of the family, Asa Buchanan on the show, and he’s always been a sort of two-bit conman, and everyone on the show finds out that he is the heir apparent and it’s sort of a fish-out-of-water story because he’s the last guy who should inherit all this money.

AE: You’re also in a television movie called Point View Terrace. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
TW: That’s a pilot that a friend and associate of mine, Jeff Drake, wrote and directed, and two other really good actresses, Wendy Molyneux and Brooke Dillman, from Blue Collar TV, we produced that together and it’s in a pilot format and it’s at the networks now.

AE: I was reading through some old interviews and in Soap Opera Weekly you observed that some of your fans and tabloids were using the internet to chronicle your social life and you found that disturbing. Celebrities have always been under a lot of pressure to share their personal lives and the internet is making that worse. What obligation, if any, do you think an actor has to his fans who want to know about them?
TW: Well, I think an actor should be a cipher, and should be a blank slate to play many roles. I’m an actor. I’m not a reality show contestant, so my responsibility is to present characters to an audience and if the audience is interested in me as an actor or as a person, I certainly don’t begrudge them that. But I think it’s my responsibility as an actor to try to remain a blank slate so that if I play the gamut from really smart characters to downright stupid characters, from gay to straight characters, that all of them have some believability to them. Doing interviews and finding out about the actors who play those parts just makes it more difficult to be, by definition, an actor.

AE: Any other big projects that you’re looking at down the road?
TW: No, One Life to Live on the east coast and Desperate Housewives on the west coast is keeping me busy, so I’m thankful for being as busy as I am right now.

AE: Thanks so much for taking with us, Tuc.
TW: My pleasure.