| With three Emmys for playing GL's Reva Shayne Lewis Cooper, Kim Zimmer is not an underrated actress. But she deserves special mention this week because she brought Reva back to the Reva of old, the woman who would do anything for her children and would torment Josh with her words even when she was loving him in her heart. Reva may have chosen to let Annie raise her children because she thought it was in their best interest, but she is still fiercely devoted to them. This devotion became clear through the personal way in which Zimmer approached the scenes of Shayne trapped in the collapsed Fifth Street building. "A lot of the emotion came from picturing one of my own children in the situation," Zimmer explains. Yet even while using that personalization, Zimmer didn't allow the monumental emotions of the scene to spill over into histrionics. Zimmer also made another contribution to these scenes: She ad-libbed the line in which Reva told Shayne he couldn't die because she hadn't gotten the chance to know him. "I wanted the audience to know that that was where Reva's mind-set was," the actress explains. "She wanted to will this boy to live because she wanted to be given the opportunity to know what a wonderful kid he is. So that was her motivating, driving force during that whole time." As for Reva's motivation for taking her anger out on Josh, Zimmer says, "The whole wonderful thing about Josh and Reva is that they love each other so much it hurts, so they are hurtful to each other. At this point, though, it's just by rote; it's something that's inherent in them." Even so, Zimmer admits she had a hard time with the line where Reva told Buzz in front of Josh that she would be with him "always," a word that has special meaning for Josh and Reva. "How do you play that stuff?" Zimmer declares. "You just have to commit to it; you can't back off." |