Boy : what a girl !
By T.G., Soap Opera Update, 1992	Home   Cette page en Français

They should have just given us the name Sydney Penny when we asked, "Who is the actor portraying Troy ?". We would have just assumed that "Sydney" was a male and that would have been the end of that. But Santa Barbara wouldn't creating a swell of mystery. And after seeing Penny on air as a boy named Troy, we realized that something was funny. So after much persistence, Santa Barbara told us the name of the actress who was portraying Troy (B.J.). Here, Sydney Penny tells Soap Opera Update how she feels about landing her first soap role.

"Oh, Jack Wagner's (Warren) cool ! He keeps people laughing on the set, which I think is priceless, since there's so much tension caused by having to work so quickly . He keeps things in perspective. When I first started working with Jack, he didn't make me nervous at all. I just couldn't help but look at him and think, "Gee, what a bizarre guy." And then after thinking that, saying, "This is fun !""

Eric Close (Sawyer) - "I can't say enough about him, I just adore him. I absolutely love him. He has such a good self-image and lots of love for other people. Immediately, I thought, "This guy is really my brother." Eric has come out to my house, and we've gone out and had sushi. We've thrown around a baseball in my backyard because he's supposed to be a pitcher on the show - and baseball is my passion - so I was kind of helping him learn how to pitch. And the same goes for Paula Irvine (Lily). Paula doesn't live far from me, and we went to breakfast over at Denny's the other day and found out what we both like all of the same music."

"I appeared in The Thorn Birds when I was 10-years-old, but I have been acting since I was six, doing commercials and television movies. I was in the first movie that Ron Howard ever directed, it was one of those films that sat around that nobody knew what to do with. Then it changed titles three times and finally got put out as a movie of the week. It was called Through The Magic Pyramid."

"I did my screentest as a boy. I remembered all of the gestures and motions of my guy friends and put it all together. I didn't expect to be switching my gender - and it's not what you think you're going to be doing when you wake up in the morning ! I lowered my voice a little bit, which I think got better as the shows went along. At first it felt very, very strange."

"I have my own ideas about why B.J. has been posing as a boy. I think that she got to the point in her life where she was caught in the middle between her mom and her dad. Her dad told her things that he probably should have been telling his wife. I think that she feels alienated a little bit in the family, but she always adores Sawyer. I believe that she took the cover of the guy partially because she could say and do things as a guy that are more accepted. She could vent her anger and frustration as a guy, and be opinionated and strong. And if she did those things as a woman, you know what she'd be called. B.J. is daddy's girl. And I think that B.J. were male, she would be everything that her father would want in a son. And he's trying to get that out of Sawyer. Maybe B.J. is being this guy because that's what her dad kind of guided her toward."