Monday, November 16, 1998
Onscreen, Melrose Place is chockful of manipulative go-getters. Backstage, however, everyone's much more mellow, reports series star John Haymes Newton.
Newton, who joined the Fox show (Mondays, 8 pm/ET) this season as Ryan McBride — the younger brother of Rob Estes's Kyle McBride — is an avid practitioner of yoga, meditation and martial arts. And he's not alone among the Melrose denizens.
"It's really funny — a lot of the other cast members do yoga and meditation," Newton tells Dish. "Rena Sofer and I meditate together sometimes at lunch. Rob Estes will meditate sometimes. And Josie [Bissett] and Rob do yoga. We all pool our latest books and trade stuff and help each other out on the set."
Newton, who's been getting in touch with his spiritual side for nearly 12 years, just might be the most relaxed of the Melrose gang: He says he spends three and a half to four hours a day meditating and doing yoga. How does he fit it all in? "I sleep about four to five hours a night, so I have extra time," he explains.
The actor, who got his start playing the title role in the Superboy TV series, recently found room in his busy schedule to make a couple of independent movies — the upcoming Dark Tides and Goodbye America, which also stars James Brolin and Michael York. In those rare periods when he's not working, the North Carolina native communes with nature in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, where he lives in a cabin he built himself. "If you saw it, you wouldn't go, 'Wow, what an amazing building!' You'd go, 'Does Jed Clampett live around here?' I built it with a chain saw." — Susan Campbell Beachy
