On The Dark Side
                 
                  Just when things seemed to be settling down in little Eric's
                  life, his biological dad, Deacon Sharp, blew into town.
                  CBS.com caught up with The Bold and the Beautiful's newest bad
                  boy, SEAN KANAN, at his first CBS photo shoot.
                  CBS.com: How is it going at The Bold and the Beautiful so far?
                  SEAN KANAN: I'm having a really great time. I've been having a
                  blast.
                  CBS.com: Tell me what your first day was like.
                  SEAN KANAN: My first day was really easy because I didn't have
                  any dialogue. [Laughs] I really just turned around [and
                  looked] into the camera. [I was] in and out. It kind of lulled
                  me into a false sense of security and then I got thrown to the
                  wolves and had five scenes a day...but it's been good.
                  CBS.com: How is it to be back on daytime?
                  SEAN KANAN: This is a vastly different experience for me.
                  General Hospital was a very large cast. I was very much a
                  supporting player. I never had the opportunity to run with the
                  ball, so to speak. From the get go, this character is really
                  intermixed in all of the storylines, which is great. I feel
                  very wanted here...if that makes sense. When I was doing
                  Sunset Beach, it was [at] the bottom of the ratings and it was
                  no secret that it was probably going to be a very finite job
                  and that it was going to end relatively quickly. God willing,
                  there's very little chance of that happening here. It's great
                  working as often as I can [here at B&B], in sort of a driving
                  storyline. This character is a great character. It's a lot of
                  fun to play because so far he's got no redeeming qualities.
                  The guy is a real [jerk] and that's a lot of fun to play
                  because I'd like to think that we have few qualities in
                  common. It's going to be fun once everybody hates him to
                  really see why he is that way and, hopefully, uncover some
                  shred of vulnerability.
                  CBS.com: Tell me more about him, other than the fact that he
                  is the "bad boy."
                  SEAN KANAN: To the best of my knowledge - and I'm putting this
                  together through conversations with [B&B Executive
                  Producer/Head Writer] Brad Bell and scripts - I guess I came
                  from a pretty lousy background. I got myself out of Las Vegas
                  and came to Los Angeles with Carmen, who had aspirations of
                  being an actress. I was the guy who looked out for her and
                  protected her. I think Deacon is a guy who's a survivor and,
                  as such, would do anything and everything he has to be that.
                  He's a guy who lives by his wits and is probably not the
                  product of a whole lot of education. He's gone to the school
                  of life. He's not a dumb guy. It's funny, I've come to see the
                  Forresters and the Spectras do whatever it is they need to do,
                  and he's no different. He just doesn't have the pedigree that
                  they do, but in a lot of ways [he's a] similar animal.
                  CBS.com: It sounds like you enjoy being the bad guy.
                  SEAN KANAN: Absolutely. Without a doubt. I get to exercise all
                  sorts of dark personality traits on TV that I would be very
                  leery of exercising in my real life. It's fun. I get to come
                  here and really play.
                  CBS.com: Do you see any of yourself in the character?
                  SEAN KANAN: Sure there is. I'd like to think I've got a quick
                  wit and that I've got some sort of charisma, which as an actor
                  you have to have. I think this guy is very charismatic. So,
                  there are some similarities. The difference is, I try to
                  channel mine in as positive a way as I can. This guy is purely
                  self-motivated. So, I think that's where the similarities
                  stop.
                  CBS.com: Do you think that Deacon would want to be a part of
                  his son's life?
                  SEAN KANAN: I would imagine that's what is going to happen on
                  some level. I don't know how involved he's going to be. Do I
                  see Deacon driving a carpool and being a soccer dad? Nah!
                  That's not going to happen.
                  CBS.com: What is it like to work with Gladis Jimenez [Carmen]?
                  SEAN KANAN: She's wonderful to work with. She's very much, so
                  far, relegated to the position of being the put upon
                  girlfriend. She's beautiful and I find her very intriguing.
                  I'm hoping we see why it is that she would stay with a guy
                  like this. There has to be something that compels her to stay
                  with Deacon. It's evident what I would see in her!
                  CBS.com: What would you hope for your character in the future?
                  SEAN KANAN: So far, I've been very happy with what has been
                  coming down the pike for me. I'd like to deal with what some
                  of this guy's insecurities and frailties are because all of
                  the bravado that is Deacon is armor and defense to protect
                  against something. I'd like to see what that something is.
                  CBS.com: At some point, fans tend to develop some compassion
                  for the bad guy. Do you hope we'll see a softer side to
                  Deacon?
                  SEAN KANAN: I do, but I hope it doesn't happen in a
                  cookie-cutter, formulated, saccharine type way. When I first
                  got this part I was like, "Okay, well he's going to be sort of
                  this bad guy with a heart of gold." Then, I got some
                  subsequent scripts and I thought, "This guy's not only bad,
                  but he's getting worse!" I like that. I think it's something
                  you've seen before if all of a sudden he's this great,
                  wonderful guy. I like the fact that he's a morally challenged,
                  relatively reprehensible individual. Somewhere down the line,
                  yeah, it would be nice to see why he is that way, but not in
                  an overnight turnaround where suddenly I'm paling around with
                  Rick Forrester and running errands for Sally Spectra. That, to
                  me, would impinge upon the integrity of who this character has
                  been established as so far.
                  CBS.com: Would you say he's a loner in the sense that he will
                  never form friendships with other characters?
                  SEAN KANAN: No. If I had to use my amateur psychology
                  background, I would say that this is a guy who has deep, deep
                  feelings of not being good enough. He's probably incredibly
                  self-conscious about the fact that he comes from a lower
                  income family, no education, from a trashy background. I was
                  talking to Justin Torkildsen [Rick] and I was saying that we
                  should try to bring to our scenes the layer that, in a weird
                  way, Rick is everything Deacon would ever want to be. He's
                  legitimate. He's wealthy and he's set. That's probably, from
                  Deacon's perception, everything there is in life. Deacon
                  represents a walk on the wild side and is everything Rick
                  can't be because of his position and who he is. I think,
                  sometimes, circumstance makes strange bedfellows and friends.
                  I was talking to Susan Flannery [Stephanie] today because we
                  have some scenes coming up where she starts to get into my
                  psyche. I said, "Your character has incredible strength and
                  complexity to it that I would imagine Deacon would admire in a
                  woman and would have hoped for in his own mother." It would be
                  interesting if these two people, from divergent backgrounds,
                  would somehow form some bizarre, mutual respect.
                  CBS.com: How did your casting come about?
                  SEAN KANAN: I had gotten a call from my manager to come in and
                  meet with, I thought it was just, Brad Bell. When I got there
                  it was Brad and Rhonda [Friedman, Supervising Producer] and a
                  couple other people. They brought Adrienne [Frantz, Amber] up
                  to read with me and I got the feeling that this was more than
                  just a perfunctory thing. What interests me is that I read
                  [the role of] Rick or C.J. for the audition, which couldn't be
                  further from who Deacon is. They took a leap of faith to cast
                  me in this part. I was going to leave to go to New York to do
                  a film and when [I found out] there would be no screen test
                  and it was a straight offer [I thought], "What am I going to
                  do? I can do a film and be out of work in three weeks, or I
                  can have a job for a few years and have the time out to do
                  films." It's the best of both worlds. I have a production
                  company that my partner, Jessica Hammerschlag, and I started
                  about eight months ago. [Doing B&B] allows me to do both
                  things that I love, which is, work all the time and to
                  continue to build on my film career.
                  CBS.com: Let's talk a bit about the movie you just produced.
                  SEAN KANAN: The film's called March. I produced it and played
                  the lead character, Julian March. It stars Cynda Williams, who
                  was in One False Move and Mo' Better Blues, Rena Sofer, who
                  was on General Hospital, and Michelle Phillips. It's somewhere
                  in the vein of American Beauty. It's a suburban family that,
                  from the outside, has this Rockwell-ian veneer to it, where
                  everything is okay. You learn very quickly that everything is
                  not okay. My character's life unravels very quickly. The thing
                  I like about it is [that] it's a film that is a little
                  disturbing. It's unnerving. It provokes questions that at
                  every point in some people's lives you've asked, but are
                  afraid to ask out loud. I have a Web site for the movie at
                  Marchthemovie.com. The director, who's been one of my best
                  friends since the fourth grade, is James Mercurio. The writer
                  is from my hometown also, Dean [Morini]. [I've] known him
                  since sixth grade. The three of us used to hang out on a stoop
                  at a gas station in Pennsylvania talking about how we were all
                  going to move out to Hollywood someday and make a movie. This
                  just all seems to feel very right. I feel like I'm in a good
                  space here.
                  CBS.com: Where are you originally from?
                  SEAN KANAN: I'm from a little town in Pennsylvania called
                  Newcastle, outside of Pittsburgh.
                  CBS.com: When did you move out and decide to become an actor?
                  SEAN KANAN: May 20, 1987...a year that will live in infamy.
                  [Laughs] I was going to school at Boston University. I always
                  knew I wanted to act. I was doing stand-up comedy. Actually,
                  just before this past Christmas, I was in Bosnia and Kosovo
                  with the Secretary of Defense doing the USO. [We performed] a
                  variety show for all the troops in Macedonia, Bosnia and
                  Kosovo. It was amazing.
                  CBS.com: Is producing what you ultimately want to do?
                  SEAN KANAN: I really don't want to limit myself to that or to
                  acting. I love acting. Acting is playing for me. I love to
                  just get out there and play. Producing, I like for a lot of
                  reasons. It appeals to the control freak in me. It allows me
                  to be involved on every level. I write also. I've written a
                  film that Lion's Gate [Films] is going to be distributing. I
                  would like to be one of those hyphenate hybrids. If I had to
                  really say what is it that I would want to do, if not on the
                  same level, then in the same vein as a Michael Douglas. The
                  guy who has a production company, his film career and
                  occasional step-ins as a writer, to tweak scripts here and
                  there to suit what he and his production company are trying to
                  do. Eventually, I would like to direct. I do think that with
                  the amount of time I can get out of B&B, it wouldn't allow me
                  enough preparation time to direct, produce and act. That's a
                  little too ambitious.
                  CBS.com: What do you do in your spare time?
                  SEAN KANAN: I kickbox. I cook. I don't have a lot of spare
                  time. I love my work. I love the producing stuff and putting
                  time into my new business is a lot of fun. This is new for me,
                  so it's still a lot of fun and I hope it continues to be a lot
                  of fun!





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