ASKDAYS: When you two aren't working, what do you like to do?
MELISSA REEVES: I like to sew; I love to sew. In between teaching my 3-year-old how to go on the toilet, which is so completely aggravating right now. If any moms have any good tips out there, I am so open.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: When not dealing with child rearing issues like Missy, I like to read and enjoy just getting outside. Every now and then we get out of town or the mountains or ocean. I just love that. We're in CA where we're roughing it an hour away from any amazing place. Whenever possible, I like to get out to places like that.

ASKDAYS: Matt and/or Melissa — what do you enjoy most about your return?
MELISSA REEVES: Working with Matt.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: Working Melissa. In short, it is kind of interesting. You see something written on the page and not sure how it will turn out. I think it will go in one direction and based on an adjustment Missy made, it goes a different way. The way she played or underplayed something, or took it in a direction I didn't expect. The whole scene goes another way. It's fun. It's the reason you want to be an actor. You get surprised.
MELISSA REEVES: We like to surprise each other. Keeps us on our toes.

ASKDAYS: When did you two start in the acting business?
MELISSA REEVES: Mine was in 1984 on Santa Barbara.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: Mine was I don't remember what year I played the ass. Does this count? I came out of school and went onto One Life to Live. I was doing theater things also, but that is primarily what I enjoyed.

ASKDAYS: ask Melissa - How hard is it to balance being a mom and the demands of a daytime TV show?
MELISSA REEVES: Actually coming back to the show, we have a brand new schedule, and my average hours and this will sound horrible because it's such an easy workload, is about 3 days a week on average and 4-5 hours a day, so only 15 hours a week, so it doesn't take too much time away from the kids at all. It's mostly during the day when they're in school.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: You're not counting all the time learning all those lines.
MELISSA REEVES: That's when they're in bed. It's the perfect job to be a mom, because you're not really taking hardly anytime away from your kids.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: Well I think being a mother.
MELISSA REEVES: The time that I'm away from them is during school hours, and Scott also has the same schedule, so if I do happen to be at work, Scott's home, so it's a blessing for both of us to be in the same work.

ASKDAYS: Matthew, how do you fell about he teen trend in soaps?
MATTHEW ASHFORD: I feel very good about it. What do you mean teen trend? Being a teen myself. ( You mean sticking that video camera up and trying to get a shot of Nadia in the shower? I thought it was a little ingenious. It was kind of silly and fun. Is it new? As long as it's compelling, I think it's fine. In fact, maybe it's better to stick to things like people arguing about who's crammed who in the locker rather than some pseudo fake grown-up problem. Better to investigate real teen issues. Some things are juvenile, but that's the life then. Really we still do that to a certain extent. We just cover it up with more pretend sophistication. It's all the rules of the playground and who's breaking them. When Missy and I were at that Coronation in Paris, we weren't running around, chasing after each other, and some were saying "There they go baby." I do this. We were just a little more animated about it. As long as the behavior is honest, it's great. If the actors can really relate to them and connect to them and the audience does too, that's great.

ASKDAYS: What is a typical day on the set like?
MELISSA REEVES: It's so much quicker than before. Pretty much as soon as we arrive at work, we get right to hair and makeup. We block and we sort of try to find each other in the hall to rehearse, and then we go right to taping. It's a quick day.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: If they're going with their eye on the clock, you talk and talk and then on this line you go here and turn around. Never really letting us say the lines to each other in that space. Then we come back out and run through it once and go to taping.
MELISSA REEVES: It's fast.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: You really do need to do your homework and come up with ideas long before the days when you're in there shooting. You're in the studio some days but preparing for the shooting in a day or so.

ASKDAYS: Did you all watch soaps when you were growing up? What was your favorite?
MELISSA REEVES: I watched Channel 7 from Ryan's Hope, All My Children, One Life to Live, General Hospital and Edge of Night. I just kept Channel 7 on.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: I didn't really watch. My mother watched As the World Turns, and I remember her coming home one day, and she started to work or something out of the house, and she asked if she missed anything. I told her nothing happened except Dr. Bob was killed. She said "What?" That was the extent of my experience.

ASKDAYS: Hi!! Could you both tell us what your most favorite and least favorite storyline was?
MELISSA REEVES: I loved the Giant Catastrophe. I love the gigantic catastrophes. They're just fun. I guess the least favorite is when there's not a lot going on in your storyline and saying lines that don't mean a whole lot.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: When you come in and pass time?
MELISSA REEVES: It's not interesting for the fans either. It's hard on a constant basis to keep your storyline interesting that way.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: I second what Missy said about when the large storylines are going, we're there a lot, and when actors get together, usually something more can come out because we're working together, and sometimes advance because of that, but I really enjoyed when Missy and I first started working together, we both had strong things to play, and she was pursuing a journalism career and I was trying to be a journalist and our points of view were at odds, yet we had a reason to work together. We were teaching each other something. In the meantime, a relationship started building, and it played. I enjoyed that time. At this point, we have some of the same dynamics going on. We are bound together with this child, Abigail, and we both have strong view points about what is best for us and her. We are disagreeing but having to deal. The writers have written some things that both of us have laughed out loud turning the pages. We've found some fun dynamics. If the newspaper will come back, it was fun being investigative and snooping. We're not solving crimes but we may think we are. You could pretty much tailor the job, but you're really just nosy. Everybody can relate to that.

ASKDAYS: What made you decide that days of our lives was the program for you?
MELISSA REEVES: I didn't actually know it was the show for me until I was on it and realized that I love the forum that it is. I love the family and values and morals that have stuck. I started the show when I was 18, so I have a family feeling at Days of Our Lives. Moving to CA so young, I latched onto it and made it a second home. I have a very familial feeling about the show.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: This show in particular has given me the opportunity and environment to really play and having worked on other shows where people are great, the show is great, the story is great, but I didn't necessarily click with the character. I realized that happened here, and it's fun. That's what's happened for me at DAYS and this company of actors and this character.

ASKDAYS: Hello Melissa and Matthew, what actor and/or actors inspired both of you?
MELISSA REEVES: I love Mary Stuart Masterson. We're pretty much the same age. I remember watching her and loving her honesty and style of how she portrays your emotions. She's just great. I always would watch her and think that's how I want to portray what I'm feeling. I just love the way she does it.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: I'm always inspired by Robert De Niro because it doesn't matter if it's comedy, drama, tragedy. He's 100 percent committed to whoever the character is. It's amazing for me to see that. There's always Jimmy Stewart. Recently, for example, Christopher Guest who directs and plays his characters, too. In Waiting for Guffman highly recommend it. We've laughed every time we've watched it. People taking chances is exciting to me to see. I love that. When it happens on DAYS, it's always exciting to see someone just go a little bit over the line and just go for it. It's very exciting.

ASKDAYS: Matthew Ashford - What was your best play at the theater?
MATTHEW ASHFORD: The play Arcadia by Tom Stoppard I did recently and really enjoyed it. However, right now I'm doing A Little Night Music playing Count Carl Magnus. It's a story of love and how people go a little insane in the spring. This character is so extraordinarily chauvinistic. He has a pea-sized brain and an ego bigger than all outdoors, but just this incredible male character. It's really fun. You do these things and see yourself and have to laugh and examine and think what part of me is there. It's great writing. There is some part there and as actors we get the chance to have some self-reflection.

ASKDAYS: Matt and Missy: I love you guys!! My question is, how do you feel about DAYS paring Jack and Jen up with other characters on the show?
MELISSA REEVES: I think that Jack and Jennifer have an ever-lasting love/hate relationship, and I can't imagine them without each other. I don't think anyone else could bring out what Jack's about than Jennifer. Nobody is capable of irritating him that much.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: We have some stuff coming up that we're just on the phone.
MELISSA REEVES: You save my life soon. You save me from death.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: Something big is happening, but in the meantime, we're given the opportunity to really bug each other.
MELISSA REEVES: We irritate each other so this horrible thing is sentimental.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: I've been in both situations where characters only have each other and then this situation where we're interacting with others, I feel it's a wise step on the part of the producers and writers to challenge ourselves. These characters are learning more about each other everyday and Jack doesn't really know Jennifer and maybe vise versa. Through these people, we're going to learn a lot more and the audience will also, but we're definitely using the people around us in the relationship, and all Jack knows is he wants Jennifer back in that house. It will require other people to do that. Soaps operate that way and a lot a people are interconnected. In a movie, we could do a beginning middle and end but this is getting complicated.

ASKDAYS: What is it like to be back on DAYS after both of your long breaks? Is it different from the way you remembered, aside from the new cast members left and right?
MELISSA REEVES: I feel like so many of the crew people are the same, and there are a lot of people behind the scenes that are the same, and I was nervous the first day back and it turned out that it felt like I never left. It was wonderful and exciting, and everybody has welcomed me back so wonderfully.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: It was somewhat easier for me because Missy was already there. I saw her first. Then I just had to work with Alice and was just coming out of the shower, but everyone was really welcoming and telling me it was good to see me, that I hadn't changed, the whole first week working on the coronation. People were very nice. They walk up and show you pictures of their family. You get caught up. You realize it's a connection that goes on beyond years. In this company of actors and crew, they have lifetime commitments and connections, and that's really nice.

ASKDAYS: Megan Corleto is possibly the best child actor I've ever seen on DAYS, and seems to really connect with the two of you. How many kids did they test for the new Abby?
MELISSA REEVES: That's so funny. Megan was actually in virtual Eden set. She was in those scenes, and I guess they saw her from those scenes and decided they wanted her to be a little younger. They changed the character completely. She really is a great little actress.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: She has more credits than the two of us combined.
MELISSA REEVES: She keeps us on our toes.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: She knows her lines and our lines.

ASKDAYS: I'm so glad jack and Jen are back but how can she deal with his off the wall humor without cracking up?
MELISSA REEVES: Believe me, I have to go in my dressing room and run lines with Matt an hour before we go on stage to get my laughing out. More times than none, I'm biting my cheeks to keep from laughing.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: What was that line we just had about Martha Stewart and decoupage?
MELISSA REEVES: I almost started laughing there.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: All of a sudden, Hope and Julie and Grandma Ford came over and ganged up on me. Grandma Horton it was. It was interesting because it was a big power ship and Jack went back to sniping. They brought all these gifts and came up with a Martha Stewart connection and decoupaging the driveway, but Missy had to look me straight in the face and just walk out of the room, and you did.
MELISSA REEVES: But I had a little smirk out the side of my face.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: You were smiling or otherwise you'd cry from hearing it all. He's just looking for a response.

ASKDAYS: Which do you prefer playing? Comedy or drama?
MELISSA REEVES: I like doing the comedy so much. I love the big catastrophes. I love the disguises. I love all the funny stuff. It takes so much out of you to have to cry all day.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: Which she does and can do very well. I like a little dramedy every now and then. People are writing it more. It can take a turn. It's funny and then it turns. I remember we did a scene once where Jennifer was pursuing Jack and having to wear her heart on her sleeve, getting to the point where it was embarrassing. We just had a scene where she said, "If you don't want me, you don't want me." That was a painful scene. I felt bad when she said it. It was like being on the playground with somebody not wanting to be your friend, but then it was compounded with next being in a bathtub full of suds, and somehow I got in that bathroom and she's in there naked I assume under the suds, and I had to do something and slipped and fell into the tub, and it was funny. It was written funny, but because of what had come before, it started off funny with my face down in the suds coming up but the way it was played, it was somewhere between laughter maybe and sad and took a quick turn. I had to get out of the room. I had pushed it too far as Jack. It was killing this poor young woman whose heart was really broken. That scene did that and had everything in it. I remember that feeling bad coming out of that scene. It was written to be a funny thing, but you'd finally had enough. It was beyond tears. It was "I have nothing left, empty, please don't hurt me." Those kind of scenes come along every now and then and that caused a shift in the characters, that dramedy.

ASKDAYS:Hi Missy and Matt! This is Toni-Lynne and I've been a fan of your since the 80's! I am so glad to see you two together again. What would you say has been the most embarrassing moment that has happened while filming on the set?
MELISSA REEVES: It's always embarrassing when you start laughing and can't stop. That gets catchy. It's horrible. You can't get through the scene without laughing.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: How about when we were shooting the movie. Missy and I were in the movie Bonfire of the Vanities,but we were cut out so don't rent it. Rent Waiting For Guffman"instead. We were on the set of this big movie and doing our little bit where we come on in this TV show playing a man who's defending midgets. This man slipped and fell into a urinal and it was a midget. But the point is there is this character who played the midget who was a small person, and Missy and I were waiting to go on and this man was in his suit smoking a cigar, and all of a sudden, we heard this sound that was unmistakable - really bad flatulence. At the same moment we both looked at him. He knew we knew, and we both looked away pretending we didn't hear it. And then he very loudly said, "Excuse me!" And we tried to act like we didn't hear that. But then he stared at us afterward to try to elicit a response from us and we were both laughing by then.
MELISSA REEVES: We were dying then. Laughing so hard. My face was so hot, I was so embarrassed. It was as bizarre as the whole movie.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: It didn't happen on the DAYS set, but it happened on a set.

ASKDAYS: Who is the most fun co-worker on the set, Jennifer? Same question to Jack.
MELISSA REEVES: I'll have to say Matthew, of course. He just cracks me up. The other I love working with is Kristian Alfonso, because when two girls get together, well you know. We talk and talk and eat junk food and talk some more. It's fun, and we don't have enough girl scenes, so when we get to work together we have fun.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: I enjoy Missy the most, because it's fun. We approach from the right place. I've not been working with that many people. A long time ago, this guy Wayne Heffley played the character of Vern. I was his boss and he was Jennifer's boss in a sense. He was editor. He was my sidekick. When things weren't going well with Jennifer, I could kick Vern. At this time I'd just started coming back to the show. I have to say we had a scene with Kevin Spirtas. We didn't have any lines together, but he turned and looked at me at some point and I didn't know he was going to include me. I had turn away from all his doctor lines. Some fun stuff with Greta and Julianne.

ASKDAYS: Are either of you planning to attend the Emmys next month?
MELISSA REEVES: I didn't realize the night they fell on and my daughter and I are going away on a mother/daughter retreat that weekend. It's been planned since the fall, so there's no way I could tell Emily we couldn't go on our weekend together. But there's always next year.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: I'm going to be doing final previews for A Little Night Music at that time also, but like Missy said there's always next year.

ASKDAYS: Do you get mobbed for autographs often? What was the strangest thing you ever autographed?
MELISSA REEVES: I've autographed people's skin, their arms, legs, backs with a pen.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: With a knife.
MELISSA REEVES: That's probably the strangest. I think the guys get a few stranger requests.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: I've had a few strange things.
MELISSA REEVES: Some lady asked Scott once if he wanted to feel her breast. We came home and died laughing.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: With his pen? ( Someone gave me a strange black laminated piece of paper. I'm writing on it and asked and this girl said it was my grandmother's death certificate. Sure enough it was when I turned it over. That's all I had. There it is!
MELISSA REEVES: That is odd!

ASKDAYS: Do you have any say in your wardrobes?
MELISSA REEVES: Richard Bloore our wardrobe designer is incredible that I never question what he puts on me. I wished he lived in my house and went shopping with me. He dresses me better than I dress myself.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: She's a hottie.
MELISSA REEVES: Thanks to Richard. He knows our bodies and knows what's right.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: He'll ask if we're uncomfortable and will respond to that. They want people to be comfortable. It can be a very enjoyable relationship with people in wardrobe. Make sure you take care of the clothes. Keep your collar clean of makeup.

ASKDAYS: For Matt & Missy: if you could each choose one former castmate/character to return, who would it be?
MELISSA REEVES: McDonald Carey. He played Tom Horton.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: That kind of says it.

ASKDAYS: Melissa and Matthew, thank you so much for being with us today! Do you have any last words for your fans, before we have to close?
MELISSA REEVES: Thank you for your continued support of our show. We wouldn't be there if it weren't for you.
MATTHEW ASHFORD: And their continued support is directly proportional. The producers and directors and writers are there to create the best possible show. They like to hear what they create is working. Thank you for enjoying our characters and our work. Here's to a lot more.

Special thanks to Emily Eyre for giving me the transcripts.