OFF WITH HER HEAD
For GH’S big reveal of Mary Pat’s fate — she was decapitated by Ryan — the doomed nurse’s portrayer, Patricia Bethune, had to make a trip out to Vincent Van Dyke Effects in Burbank, CA, to get a head cast made. “Years prior, I had head casts done when I worked on BUFFY and ANGEL,” she says. “So, I said, ‘Are you sure you need me? I know I have a dead head from BUFFY on a shelf somewhere!’ But no, they needed a fresh one. Thankfully, they have a new process where they do your nose and your ears first so that you can breathe when they pour this silicone cover over your entire body and put a plaster cast on top of that. It could be claustrophobic; you have to go into a Zen mode, as all of a sudden, your senses are taken away. But this time, I could breathe. When I had it done before, they had to put straws up the nose to make sure you could breathe, which is a very odd feeling. These guys were pros and it took about an hour and a half to do the whole thing. Then they come in and take your skin tones and look at your hair and weave in the hair and the lashes. They take a lot of pictures of you for when they get to the stage of molding it and painting it. I can’t even believe how much they made it look like me. I mean, it’s so amazing, how lifelike — or dead-like! — and how real it looks. It takes them maybe two weeks to finish the whole thing. I got to see it when I came in to film one of my last days at GH. They were all so excited about it! They were going to be doing the scene with the head the next day and they ran the head up to me in a box so I could see it. It’s pretty phenomenal!”