Tatum O’Neal stars in MyNetworkTV’s new telenovela “Wicked Wicked Games,” and it will likely be her last.
“I don’t think I would do a novela again,” O’Neal said last week, noting the heavy work load involved in a five-nights-a-week drama.
“To be honest, you have to be in your 20s. I’m in my 40s.” She’s 43.
MyNetworkTV, the Fox-owned network that was created after the demise of UPN,
exclusively airs telenovelas Monday through Friday. “Wicked Wicked Games” stars O’Neal as a sophisticated beauty who was left brokenhearted after a lover dumped her for another woman, played by Joan Severance. Twenty-five years later, O’Neal’s character is trying to destroy the guy who ditched her.
The show will launch Wednesday (7 p.m., KTVD- Channel 20) along with “Watch Over Me,” a new telenovela starring Dayanara Torres as a grad student engaged to a ruthless multimillionaire businessman. “Watch Over Me” airs at 8.
Producers shot 65 episodes of each show over a period of four months, meaning the cast worked six long days every week, and on multiple episodes daily.
“I did not audition for this one,” O’Neal joked. “They probably wouldn’t have gotten me. It’s just so much work.”
Torres said the difficulty with the telenovela work schedule is that so much of it is shot out of sequence, leaving the actors with little emotional guidance for their characters.
O’Neal is no stranger to hard work. Last season, she was in the cast of FX’s “Rescue Me,” and negotiations are under way to have her back next season. It’s the large volume of work in a short time that made “Games” so demanding, she said.
And it’s not that she didn’t have some idea. Her father, Ryan O’Neal, who starred in the soap “Peyton Place,” once warned her about the workload on that type of show.
“We shot so fast, your energy is never down, you’ve got to move on,” she said.
