| On The Set of "Tiny Dancer" With Rising Star Melissa Gallo |
|
|
|
Page 1 of 2
 Melissa Gallo's training in acting and dance paid off with this breakthrough role in "Tiny Dancer"  Director Eva Husson (left) with her script supervisor on the set of "Tiny Dancer" I walked down a few steps, almost banging my head as I passed through a small doorway, and made my way down a foul-smelling basement corridor until I came to an alcove outside two basement apartments. This is where I was relieved to find the multinational crew for "Tiny Dancer," an indie written and directed by Eva Husson that began as a selection of the 2005 Sundance Writing and Directing Labs and is due for a 2007 release.
 "Tiny Dancer" star Melissa Gallo  Gallo sippin' on a shake  With her career on an upward trajectory, Gallo is all smiles these days MG: No, they met here. My dad left Cuba when he was about 12, and my mother was about 15. They met in New Jersey. They were high school sweethearts and now they've just celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary. They're ridiculously cute. My dad works in Chinatown but they still live in Lindenhurst, New Jersey, near Giants Stadium. Q: Though you were born and grew up here, you don't have a Spanish accent; I'm sure many people assume the name Gallo is Italian. MG: That's true, especially since Lindenhurst is mostly Italian and Irish with a very small Latino population. Our name is pronounced Gayo, but my dad says we probably have some kind of Italian ancestry, although I'm not sure if he's serious. I keep playing Puerto Ricans--Ati in "Tiny Dancer" is Puerto Rican and Adriana, my character on "One Life to Live," is half-Puerto Rican--but I'm of Cuban descent. Being Cuban, to me, is all about family, and culture, and tradition--and food and music. I have a very big family, a lot of whom live in Queens and elsewhere in the tri-state area and in Miami, and we have about forty people at our house every Christmas Eve for a big sit-down dinner and presents. This was something my mother's mother did in Cuba at her house, so my mother began doing it here before I was born. It's a great tradition in our family. Q: Did your parents support your decision to be an actress? MG: They always were supportive but I'm not sure they always believed me when I said I wanted to perform professionally when I grew up. They'd take me to the theater and pay for all my dance and acting classes, but I do remember that when I was a teenager they had to shift their thinking and start taking my ambitions more seriously, especially when I was looking into performing arts schools. I knew before them that I was serious about going into acting. They said with some surprise, "Oh, she's really going to do this now..." When I was in college, they got more and more supportive. Q: That you have your first starring movie role in "Tiny Dancer" seems appropriate since as a girl you were primarily a dancer. MG: To be able to play a dancer in a movie is amazing. I grew up as a ballet and jazz dancer. As a girl I wanted to be a dancer but when I turned 16 or 17 I realized I loved acting even more and switched to that route. So I never thought there would come a time when I'd be paid to dance. Q: Did you give up dancing when you were a drama major at NYU? MG: No. I was at Tisch, in an acting-based musical theater program. Along with my acting classes, I took some great dancing classes with some incredible teachers. Jazz and lyrical dance became my passions. Since graduating I've been a professional actor and don't dance as much as I used to, but if I go more than a month or two without dancing I get really bummed out. Q: At Tisch, did you appear in any student films? MG: Unfortunately, no. I wish I'd had the time to have done some short films but school was crazy and I also was busy doing a show pretty much every semester. And in the summer, I worked in a theme park and as a caterer-waiter so I wasn't in the city. Q: The story about you is that you were employed for a grand total of four hours after college. MG: I auditioned for "One Life to Live" about two weeks before I graduated from NYU. I then put it out of my head while I took my finals. Then four hours after I took my last exam, I got the call that I had gotten the part as Dorian's [Robin Strasser] long-lost daughter. My dad's favorite joke was, "Melissa was an unemployed actress for four hours."
 Gallo has played Adriana Colón Cramer on "One Life to Live" since 2004  Gallo with her OLTL co-star Matthew Twining MG: Not really. When it came up I was finished with school and had a lot of loans over my head. I remember my agent asking me cautiously, "Do you want to work on a soap opera?" And I said, "I just want to work. I want to be a working actor." I didn't care what I did as long as it was acting. I'd never even watched a soap opera and had no idea what I was getting into. My dad was recovering from heart surgery at the time and the security of being able to stay in the city for a few more years to be near my parents was really important to me. I wasn't ready to go to L.A. I wanted to act and be in New York. Q: Is Adriana a good girl or bad girl? MG: She was a good girl, but now she's making a transition, taking revenge on her mother. So I'm getting to do a lot of good, crazy soap stuff. Playing her as a good girl was fine but they kept putting her with these nice guys and there was nowhere to go with their storylines. Now they paired me up with a bad boy and it's more interesting. There's more stuff to do and I can be sassy. Q: Did your fan mail change when you changed? MG: Yes. I've been getting more mail. And I got my first hate mail. That was fun. I hung it up on the actors' message board for a few days because I thought it was really funny. Q: At what point did you tell your agent that you wanted to do other things besides "One Life to Live?" MG: She always knew. I have a really good relationship with my agent, so she's been aware of what I wanted to do. We both agreed to wait a year and let me settle in at the soap and make relationships. The first thing that came up was a pilot. That was a little early for me, so we backed off a bit and didn't go after anything for a while. |