KIM COLES ON JOINING DAYS

Kim Coles admits she had to think twice when the call came to audition for the role of Nurse Whitley on DAYS.

“I immediately went into fear because I’ve heard stories about working on soap operas,” she recalls. “That the schedule is grueling, that you have to learn a lot of lines, and I was like, ‘Oh, God, I don’t wanna work that hard [laughs].’ ”

But Coles, a sitcom alum who has spent the majority of her career eliciting laughs, wanted to expand her horizons. “I don’t fancy myself a dramatic actress, but something in me said, ‘Take this on, this is gonna be a really cool challenge,’ and why couldn’t I do it?” she explains. “It was different than anything I’d ever done before. I have not done a lot of drama, so I was really intrigued by and challenged by the depths of where we were going to be going.”

Her alter ego, Nurse Whitley, has certainly provided Coles with the opportunity to explore something new. “I usually play sweet, loving, good people,” she muses. “I’m not saying she’s not good but she’s complex. I don’t think I’ve ever played anybody this complex before. Nothing I’ve ever done involved kidnapping a whole man, and I didn’t know that going in. I just knew that this was someone who had experienced some loss and had a psychological break of some kind and was going to act out this break in a very particular way.”