Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age Read Online Free PDF

strange mix. Even just Roger’s choice of us using our real names created for me a bit of uncertainty: “Am I supposed to be me? Or a character?”
    BLAKE SENNETT: It’s hard to remember what’s real and what’s part of the show.
    VANESSA LINDORES: Pretty much played ourselves. Don’t recall being confused.
    OMAR GOODING: I was definitely playing myself: an excited kid doing what he loves!
    RICK GALLOWAY: I always had problems with the way people viewed me as my character. It was this feeling that people thought I was this stupid actor.
    ALASDAIR GILLIS: Kevin Kubusheskie is another character who was kind of a dopey dimwit that wasn’t him. It was an exaggerated aspect of Kevin being kind of laid-back, kind of foreshadowing the “teen slacker.” But he wasn’t that.
    ROGER PRICE: No one in real life is as dumb as these kids sometimes appeared to be. And they were selected for their high intelligence. We exaggerated their existing character traits quite a lot. Otherwise, they were themselves.
    MICHAEL BOWER: I was a character on a Nickelodeon show named
Donkeylips
. There was no “development” on that, really. Every role you see on TV—unless it’s an older, really good actor playing it—is always 70 percent that person at that point in their life with the other 30 percent being from acting class or something. With me, they had one fat dude. They weren’t going to say, “Come in for Ug.” That ain’t gonna work. Even the casting director was like, “Oh. You’re here for Donkeylips.”
    KIRK BAILY: It was a combo of what was on the page and what me and Slavkin and some of the early directors fashioned over time. I grew up in a family of four brothers, and the TV shows in the house were
Three Stooges
and
Abbott and Costello
. I was exposed to that style really early on. I also did a lot of training in New York City. Movement classes. And I went to Boy Scout camp for six or seven years straight with counselors who definitely had the attitude of, “Get it right or pay the price!”
    ARON TAGER: That’s the secret of playing comedy and playing scary: You
believe
that what you’re saying is important to you. You don’t have to put on a Bela Lugosi voice. You don’t have to do a Boris Karloff. In fact, all the best scary actors never did anything but play it straight. With the right music and if the director leaves you alone, everything is fine.
    D.J. MACHALE: That’s Horror 101. In most horror movies, they’ll have that little bit of lightness to it to kind of laugh and wink at it. Going to “the funny” is a natural tension reliever, because all the stories are so hyped anyway.
    RICHARD M. DUMONT: Ron Oliver let me have the last line in “The Tale of the Super Specs” when the spirit tries to get the three of us. I jumped under the table and said, “Take the children!” That was just an ad-lib, but Ron and D.J. MacHale were both like, “Yes, yes, yes! You’ve got to put that in!”
    RON OLIVER: Of course, when he came back up, his face was all red and puffy because of the dry ice machine blowing at him. It was kind of horrible.
    RICHARD M. DUMONT: “The Tale of the Super Specs” was, I think, the first episode with my character, Sardo, and was when he said, “That’s Sar-
do
! No ‘mister’—accent on the ‘doh!’” It was always in the script. It was a wonderful, wonderful bit that came, as best I know, from the wonderful mind of D.J. MacHale.
    SARAH CONDON: It’s very different casting kids than adults. They really have to have the essence of the character in them.
    HEIDI LUCAS: I did not specifically work with anyone on the set for character development. Thankfully—and ironically—being a brat was something that just came easily for me.
    MEGAN BERWICK: The first day of filming, Heidi brought in three racks of her own clothing because she wanted to make sure she looked beautiful. I was like, “Wow!” One of the nice things was that I got a little cooler working with cool girls