| Nathaniel Marston: Renaissance Man | |
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There is a moment, for just a second, when the opportunity is almost too good to pass up. Nathaniel Marston (Al, ONE LIFE TO LIVE) is walking with his interviewer-to-be to lunch, and realizes he has no money on him. "I just need to stop off for a minute," he notes, nodding his head towards a bank on the corner. Biting her tongue, itching to let the anecdote write itself ("Nathaniel Marston approaches an ATM and handles it with care! Nathaniel Marston withdraws money from an ATM without destroying it!") Instead the interviewer reminds him that lunch is on Soap Opera Digest. Drat.
Just The Facts Other Acting Jobs: Played the character of Trey in the 1996 Comedy Horror, The Craft. Best-known as: Eddie Silva in As The World Turns from 1998-2000. |
It is one of the questions, though, which naturally comes up when hanging with Marston, who prior to coming to OLTL late last year had played streetwise Eddie on ATWT and, mere months before he was sacked, was arrested for attacking an ATM machine and charged with criminal mischief. (The charges were dropped.) "I paid for the machine, which was broken to begin with," he explains, and then continues with a long discussion about sensationalism in the tabloid press. "It's the one part of the business that could make me run away." He's got many points to make, all of which are valid - no doubt the machine was broken, no doubt all he tried to do was retrieve his card. But it is the question that had fans antsy once he signed up to replace Michael Tipps as Al, and one which dogs him.
"...until that big deal with Dreamworks comes through - he's happy to be rolling around as a sometimes-paralyzed (but getting better) Al on OLTL." |
At over six strapping feet, he can be an intimidating presence, certainly someone you could imagine going berserk at an ATM. Yet talk to Marston and he's obviously not what his reputation would lead you to believe. He's older and a little wiser now: "When you get older, you realize it's a lot more fun to go out every three weeks than it is to go out three days a week. Otherwise, it rolls into one big night out and you're like, 'This is boring. Here I am again, out with you people.' " Instead, he's been inside more often, working on film projects and scripts with his writing partner. "We sit down and put on the recorder. I come up with a lot of the ideas, and my partner structures them," he outlines. "It's a real collaboration. We feed off of each other." And in the meantime - until that big deal with Dreamworks comes through - he's happy to be rolling around as a sometimes-paralyzed (but getting better) Al on OLTL.
"It's comparing apples and oranges," he says when asked how his new gig is different from ATWT. "This is a whole different feeling here. You have to go across the street to get to the cafeteria. So, that's different." He wouldn't likely be fazed by any changes between shows; Marston has been acting practically since he was in diapers. His mother hauled him across the country while she looked for acting work herself, and "She'd work in a play house and they'd give her money and a space to live in," he remembers. "So any time they had a role for a young kid, they'd throw me in." Which gave him a great background in acting as well as behind-the-scenes work, and ultimately, he says, has taught him what he plans on doing while saving up money as an actor. "I want to paint it, I want to sell it, I want to package it," says the future Renaissance man. "I'm the guy who directs, who acts, who produces things. I want to do it all."
© Soap Opera Digest,
2002
Photo used with permission from Soap
Opera Digest.
