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And so if I decided that I wanted to ice skate, then I had to force myself to get up at five o’clock in the morning and go skating in the morning. I couldn’t just want to sleep in in the morning. It was like, if you’re going to do it, you do it a hundred percent.
And so I think that’s where it came from. And my family, we’re very active people. We’re constantly doing things. My Mom is like -- I call her Wonder Woman. Because she can do anything and everything at once. She can juggle ten different things at once.
Now, I have a hard time doing that, but my Mom, she lays bricks, she does rock work, she’s completely done my whole back yard with my Dad. It’s like they have taught my sister and me that whatever we put our minds to we can accomplish.
And my sister’s graduating from law school next May. She’s got eight years of college already, and she’s graduating from law school.
FF: So your other sibling is a sister; no other siblings?
Rebecca Herbst: No, there’s not. She’s two-and-a-half years older than me.
 Rebecca with her sister, Jenny Herbst. John Russo |
FF: So what does your Dad do?
Rebecca Herbst: My Dad, he’s in early retirement.
FF: And your Mom handles your career -- she’s your manager.
Rebecca Herbst: Yeah.
FF: She does that when she’s not building your rock garden?
Rebecca Herbst: (laughing) Oh yeah.
FF: And ten other things.
Rebecca Herbst: She does it all at once.
FF: I wish I could do that. I’m envious.
Rebecca Herbst: I wish I had the energy she has, to be able to do all this stuff. I don’t know -- she just never quits.
FF: It’s great. You get so much more done if you have that level of energy.
Rebecca Herbst: I know. I know.
FF: Let’s say around in your high school years, when you had made the choice that you were going to go into acting. You had already been acting in commercials, but now that it was going to be your definite career decision, have you found any sort of connections or similarities between being an athlete and acting? What do you bring to it from athleticism?
Rebecca Herbst: I think the skating taught me a great amount of discipline, of getting up in the morning and working on a jump, and doing it over and over and falling -- splattering all over the ice, and coming home with bruises every day. And yet you go back out, and you do it again until you land the jump, until you perfect it.
It’s very demanding. I think the main thing, though, is that it taught me an incredible amount of discipline. And how to remain focused, and just putting your all into something.
But I didn’t really decide when I chose to act, I didn’t say to myself, well, this is going to be my career. It was just, Mom, I would rather pursue this hobby at this moment than the skating.
Acting was always just a hobby to me, like most kids, they’d go home and they’d take piano lessons, or they’d go to ballet, or they’d go to cheerleading; I went on auditions. I never felt like I was abnormal for doing it, or that it was taking more out of my time than the other kids were taking out of theirs. It was just my hobby.
But then, I guess it was my senior year, and it was time for me to pick all my classes, and whether I was going to take honors classes, and college prep courses, I realized then that, you know what, I’m not going to go to a four year college right away, because I’m not ready to leave home. College is something that again you have to put a hundred percent into.
If you’re going to go to school, you need to be completely focused on school and nothing else. And I wasn’t ready to do that. I knew that I still wanted to pursue my hobby. I wanted to go out and just give it a shot, and be able to put my hundred percent in to the acting.
So I decided, when I graduate that’s what I want to do. I knew that I was going to go to a junior college, because I wasn’t just not going to go to school. But I was not ready to go to a four-year.
But then when I graduated, I’ve been working ever since. So I thank God for that, because school is not my cup of tea. A lot of people look down on that, but you know what – school’s not for everybody.
FF: No, it’s not. And as long as there are books around, you can always learn.
Rebecca Herbst: I can always learn. I’ve learned so much more from being on General Hospital than any school could ever teach me.
 Getting ready for the 1999 Daytime Emmy Awards. Left to right, boyfriend Johnny Lindesmith, sister Jenny, Rebecca, and her mom, Debbie Herbst. Courtesy Rebecca Herbst. |
FF: I was just going to ask you about being in a soap opera. And tell me -- before I ask you the question -- tell me the things you feel that it has taught you that have been so important.
Rebecca Herbst: Being on a soap, at first it puts you in this mind frame of well, you have to get up and go to work every day for the next three years. It’s not just floating by and wanting to change your mind the next day. It gives you kind of an outlook on your future, which is a very comforting feeling.
But also again it goes back to the discipline. I can’t just not get up one morning, and just want to sleep in. I have to be there, even when I’m sick. Unless you’re physically unable to get in your car and drive yourself to work, you have to be there.
You can’t say no, because it costs them so much money when an actor doesn’t come in for the day, because they have to rearrange their schedule and yada yada yada.
But also, the other thing is, that I’m constantly learning there, because we never do the same thing twice. We may be on the same set, and work with the same people, but the script is always different. So it’s kind of like being in an acting school. You’re constantly working on your craft; you’re constantly experimenting with new things, and I just think it’s the most wonderful experience I could have ever asked for.
FF: Yes, and also it must be very interesting to be in character almost daily. You really must get to know the person you’re playing extremely well.
Rebecca Herbst: I know. I always joke with myself and with my family, going, you know, you realize that I am Sybil. I am Rebecca and I am Elizabeth. When I get up on the set, I am Elizabeth. As soon as I’m in front of that camera, I’m no longer Rebecca. It’s a very weird thing.
I feel like you have to be an incredibly stable person to live a very normal, sane life in the soap world, because some people do get confused between who they really are and their character.
FF: I’m sure, I’m sure.
Rebecca Herbst: You know? Especially when you’re playing love -- you know, romances with people. And it’s like, okay, do you really like this person? As a person, are you falling in love with this person you’re playing with? Or are you just feeling it because your character feels it? You know? So it’s kind of a tricky thing.
FF: I caught you in a couple of scenes this week on General Hospital, and I think in both of them you were talking to this really cute blond guy; I don’t know his name.
Rebecca Herbst: Yeah, he plays Jason.
FF: Very nice looking, and I thought, oh, he’s cute.
Rebecca Herbst: Yeah, very cute.
FF: So, yeah, I can imagine. Tell me about the role in Hefner Unauthorized (This USA original movie documents the life of Hugh Hefner, the creator of Playboy magazine --Gina).
Rebecca Herbst: I play Barbie Benton (one of Hefner’s long-time girlfriends)...
 Randall Batinkoff as Hugh Hefner and Rebecca as Barbi Benton. Blake Little |
FF: Right, I watched it the other night.
Rebecca Herbst: Oh you did? Oh, okay. Well, when I first sat down to read the script, I was at my sister’s house in Santa Monica, and was kind of looking at the ocean, and we were going to go someplace. And then I got so wrapped up in the script, I’m like, no, no, no I have to finish it, which is very rare.
Because I get so many scripts in and out of my house these days, that I’ll start reading through it, and as soon as it reaches the point in the script where it says the girl’s running around naked through the woods or whatever, I close the script and go no, this isn’t for me.
