James Scott on the Baby Switch

We’re sure you know the story, but if you need a little refresher, here it is. Nicole, much to her surprise (she thought she couldn’t ever get pregnant) found herself carrying EJ’s child. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to carry the baby to term and, after she miscarried, she wasn’t able to tell EJ the truth. The only one who did know the truth was Brady. But even he didn’t know everything. Sure, he knew that Nicole adopted a baby and passed it off as her own; what he didn’t know was that she switched that baby with Sami’s. So Mia’s baby, Grace, died and Sami’s baby, Sydney, was still alive. And Rafe figured it all out. And EJ was pretty much the last to know.

So why didn’t EJ figure out earlier that something was up? You couldn’t expect him to uncover the depth of Nicole’s deception, but she wasn’t behaving in a normal manner. As James said, her "behavior was consistent with somebody who was being dishonest. There were several occasions when he gave her the benefit of the doubt but the circumstances looked very suspicious. He’d catch her in conversations with Brady that she’d have plausible excuses for being in, but nonetheless it seemed kind of a stretch. She seemed to be acting very strangely." In short, her behavior was questionable.

But, like many of us do with people that we love â€" and James strongly believes that EJ really <>i>did love Nicole â€" he overlooked the strange behavior. "I think the circumstances at the beginning of their relationship were not ideal," James told us. "A lot of the reasons that he didn’t challenge some of the things that she was saying and doing was because he loved her." He continued, telling us that "he took on face value her lies."

And because he did love her, maybe he’s able to have a little sympathy for what she did. A little. "She’s clearly in a tremendous amount of pain and is arguably the biggest loser in all of this," James said. But "It’s hard to say he empathizes with somebody." He brought up the situations in which women steal newborn babies from hospitals; often it’s because they’ve lost a baby themselves. "There is something which nobody would be able to relate to unless you’d actually experienced it in losing a child that drives you a little crazy, I think," James mused. "I really can’t relate to that; I don’t have any kids. It must be very difficult."

As we noted above, EJ is very angry. He’s "realized he mourned for a child that wasn’t his. The child that he thought was dead is alive. I suppose there’s some … happiness? I suppose in realizing that he really has a daughter and that she’s not dead. It’s one of those things where those kinds of emotions take a while to arrive." James continued, noting that EJ "can have some understanding towards why Samantha did what she did and why Nicole did what she did. But he’s still pretty angry. And he has reason to believe that he can’t trust his relationships with these people. "

And there’s another relationship that he really can no longer trust: that with his father. "Stefano is lucky that EJ didn’t kill him," James told us. "The DiMeras are not the most honest of people; they don’t have the integrity that maybe some other members of the town have. But the way they conduct themselves towards everybody else in the world, and the way they conduct themselves to the family, are two different things." You can do whatever you want to people outside of the family, but, as James said "I don’t do that to my father and he doesn’t do that to me. That’s the way it works. You don’t pick sides. Your family is your side and then there’s everybody else. You deal with them very differently. And he picked a side that wasn’t mine. It doesn’t matter whether he had my best interest at heart. That’s not the point. You don’t get to be judge, jury and executioner in a situation like this. You have to come forward and you tell your son what’s going on." It doesn't sound like EJ is going to have forgiveness in his heart for his father anytime soon.

As you might have gathered, these have been some emotional times in Salem, and for none more so than for EJ. So how does James prepare for this work? As he told us, "if we’re doing camera blocking, which is essentially now our rehearsal, I’ll read it like I’m reading a book I’m not interested in." He continued, telling us that often, you "will discover things in a scene that you would normally discover in a rehearsal process and put away, but you can’t do that now. So I will discover them on tape. It’s organic that way. There is some truth in that. It happens a lot. So oftentimes if it’s a really emotional scene, I’ll play with it myself, but then when we got through it for camera blocking, I’ll say it like I’m reading the dictionary, which I’m sure the other actors don’t like. Then when we go to tape it, you just throw yourself into it and forget about everything. You remember what your objective is. You find oftentimes â€" most of the time â€" that you end up going in a completely different direction than maybe you’d anticipated. Because really you don’t know what the other person is going to do. Essentially in a scene you’re always trying to win something. It helps when you don’t know what the other person is going to do, because then you don’t know what you’re going to do. If you discover one of those little secrets in camera blocking and you try to do it again in tape, you can’t. You can’t because it’s not an organic thing anymore. You’re trying to copy something and it doesn’t work."

Whatever he’s doing, it seems to be working. We’re glued to the screen to find out what James Scott as EJ might do next. And it just might surprise you.