AN INTERVIEW WITH GUIDING LIGHT’S WES RAMSEY

By Arthur Swift

April 10, 2004

Wes Ramsey has been doing a lot of traveling lately. The 26-year-old actor has been crisscrossing the country, from Los Angeles to New York, Nashville to Fort Lauderdale, taping a recurring role on the daytime powerhouse Guiding Light and attending multiple premieres of his controversial, slow-burning sleeper hit, Latter Days.

“It’s a really exciting time right now,” Ramsey said from his home in L.A. “I’m getting to check a lot off the list of things I’ve always dreamed of doing.”

Ramsey recently completed 10 episodes of Guiding Light, which will be spread out over the next couple of months. His character, Sam Spencer, is back in Springfield and he has a secret.

“I don’t know how secretive the people on the show want me to be,” Ramsey said. “But Sam is helping to take care of (his sister) Olivia’s baby. Sam gets right in the middle of the problems between Olivia (Crystal Chappell) and Lizzie (Crystal Hunt).”

Ramsey, who originated Sam in 2000 but left the show day-to-day in 2002 when his character went to journalism school, said he is open to the possibility of a larger storyline in the summer.

“In the summertime it’s a hot time to be on the show,” Ramsey said with a laugh. “And the way this storyline goes with Sam I could very well be back at that point. I’d like to be there when things sizzle in the summer. We used to have catchphrases like ‘When things heat up on Guiding Light.’ That’s the time when most people are home from school and watching the show, especially for the young characters, so it could be fun to be part of that.”

For the moment, Ramsey enjoys his new recurring status.

“When you’re a contract player on a soap it’s pretty much futile to audition for anything,” Ramsey said. “You’ve really got to give them all you’ve got. Now that I’m recurring we can all get what we want; I can try new things and Sam can stay alive on the show.”

Ramsey returned to Guiding Light this time because he has a special bond with Chappell and wanted to stay in Olivia’s life.

“I never had a sister,” Ramsey said. “And Olivia has had so many things happen with her that I thought it was important for Sam to be a part of them. With this new baby on the show I thought Sam should be there to support her.”

However, with a writing staff in transition, Ramsey wasn’t sure there would be interest in having Sam return.

“It’s my character and I created it and I didn’t want Sam to be recast,” Ramsey said. “But they were open to me coming back and I was so grateful. I was glad to be able to reprise what I think is the greatest role for an actor in daytime history.”

Veteran actress and director Ellen Wheeler is now at the helm of Guiding Light and she, along with the rest of the cast and crew, have made him feel at home, Ramsey said.

While his primary residence is in Los Angeles, Ramsey, a 2000 graduate of the prestigious Juilliard School, has maintained a unique home in New York City, where Guiding Light is shot.

“I do have a big apartment in New York,” Ramsey said. “This apartment has been rented by Juilliard actors since 1992. I took over the lease and now we rent out the rooms to actor friends. So when I’m in New York I wind up sleeping on the couch and that’s fine with me.”

Ramsey has been spending much of his time promoting Latter Days, a film he shot in four weeks in the fall of 2002 and is slowly seeing a nationwide release now.

“I just got back from the opening in Nashville,” Ramsey said. “The movie’s been opening each week in places like Washington, DC, Fort Lauderdale, Miami and now San Francisco. They’ve really been smart with the marketing and are turning it into a successful movie.”

Latter Days is the story of Aaron (Steve Sandvoss), a Mormon missionary sent to preach the word of his church in L.A. He encounters his playboy neighbor Christian, played by Ramsey, and the two explore their feelings toward one another.

“It deals with very real things: love, faith and sexuality,” Ramsey said. “And how someone who is gay and Mormon handles something forbidden by his church.”

When Christian’s friends bet him $50 that he can’t seduce Aaron, Christian expects the young missionary will be an easy conquest. But Aaron turns the tables on Christian, and for the first time Christian discovers who he is beneath his muscled exterior.

“The writer-director of the film, C. Jay Cox, is not only gay but a Mormon,” Ramsey said. “When he was a missionary in the Philippines he told me that he was a lot like Aaron, but when he left the church he changed and had similarities to my character. One day he said he looked at two photographs of himself at these two times of his life and he wondered how a story would be if you put these two photographs together.”

Latter Days was scheduled to premiere simultaneously in New York, Los Angeles and Salt Lake City but was cancelled in Salt Lake because the theatre chain pulled the film amid protests from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“The people in Salt Lake who are opposed to the movie are afraid to see it because it doesn’t portray their church in the most positive or promising light,” Ramsey said. “There’s a large dividing line between the gay community and the Mormon church.”

The movie, though, has since been released in Salt Lake and Ramsey believes the effects of Latter Days will be far-reaching.

“I think people who don’t want to be seen going to the theatre will be secretly renting it on DVD,” Ramsey said. “It’s not bad, it’s not an evil film. It just has very real subject matter that some respond to in different ways. I’ve seen people in Q & A sessions have absolute emotional breakdowns when they talk about the movie and the issues in it.”

Ramsey grew up and began his acting career in Louisville, Kentucky. When he was 18 he moved to New York to attend Juilliard and it is there that the seeds of his professional career were sown.

“One of my teachers was Brian Mertes who also directed Guiding Light,” Ramsey said. “He approached me and asked me if after graduation I ever considered doing daytime.”

Ramsey admitted to Mertes he had never worked in front of the camera before but began taking meetings in the summer of 2000 because the show was considering adding the role of Sam Spencer.

“Sam Spencer was a rebel, an intellectual free-thinker and an outdoorsman,” Ramsey said. “I liked the outdoors element because it reminded me of my brothers and spending time on the crazy trips we did, like rock climbing.”

Ramsey said he settled in quickly to the role of Sam once he won the part and developed a sisterly relationship with Crystal Chappell. He also enjoyed the love triangle he was placed in with the characters of Marah and Tony.

“One of the big highlights for me was that our characters were all seniors on the show, even though I had already graduated college,” Ramsey said. “So we got to do the senior prom and that was a lot of fun.”

After a year and a half on Guiding Light, Ramsey said the same restlessness he felt after college in trying daytime led to a need to try film, and Hollywood.

“I had never been to California before,” Ramsey said. “But a lot of people said that’s where I belonged. So Sam went to journalism school and I spent a year realizing how different the West Coast is.”

Ramsey spent much of 2002 auditioning for work and enduring the grind of “pilot season,” when most nighttime television shows are cast for the fall lineup. It was when he was starting to get desperate that Latter Days appeared.

“I really tried to show C. Jay how very much I wanted to do this movie and how seriously I would take the character,” Ramsey said. “I think we both realized that we could both help each other make our dreams for the film come true.”

In July of last year, Latter Days premiered at the Ford Amphitheatre in Los Angeles and began making the rounds of film festivals across the country.

“It was always a little fantasy of mine to go to film festivals and help promote a movie,” Ramsey said. “And with this movie the response just got better and better.”

In the meantime Ramsey landed a supporting role on the FOX sitcom, Luis starring veteran character actor Luis Guzman. He played a struggling, WASPy artist.

“It was an unexpected opportunity,” Ramsey said. “I was thrilled to be on a show and it was very funny. Unfortunately there were only six shows so people didn’t really get a chance to see it.”

From Luis came a return to Guiding Light and the premiere of Latter Days, now in its third month of release in New York. Ramsey has been spending this spring enmeshed in another pilot season, though he is finding time to pursue a “fanatical” passion of his: tennis.

“I’m a huge tennis player and watcher,” Ramsey said. “I just was in Palm Springs at the Pacific Life Open where Roger Federer and Andre Agassi played. My tennis partner and I make sure we play at least once a week. It helps keep us level in this crazy town.”

Ramsey plans to star this summer in Cavatina, an independent film written and produced by best friend and fellow Juilliard grad Stephen Anderson. Ramsey calls it a powerful human story about the importance of why people write letters.

“That’s going to be shooting in July and Jennifer Garner is going to be in it,” Ramsey said. “All those nights we spent in the basement of the apartment in New York talking about the kind of film we wanted to make are now coming together.”

And Guiding Light will continue to hover in the possibilities for Ramsey. He said Crystal Chappell told him it’s easier than he realizes for Sam to return to the show in the future.

“I didn’t know that the Hundley College of Journalism is only an hour away from Springfield,” Ramsey joked. “It’s not like I went to study abroad or anything.”

Arthur Swift is a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City.

mailto:aswift@arthurswift.com