If you've been hitting the beach lately; Sunset Beach, that is; you know Sam Behrens is the charming actor who portrays the anything but charming Gregory Richards. Gregory is a man who has a gold brick where his heart should be, and that suits Behrens just fine. A Brooklyn, NY, native, the classically trained Behrens made his first TV appearance on Ryan's Hope and later turned up on General Hospital, where he did a five-year run as attorney Jake Meyer. Behrens' acting career isn't limited to the tube, however: He played the "Hand-Jivin';" Vince Fontaine in the original Broadway production of Grease. We chatted with the actor recently about life on the Beach; and the rewards of playing the bad guy.

You've got a really juicy storyline of Sunset Beach right now. How do you feel about playing such a dastardly villain as Gregory?

I love it! It was fun being the cowboy, and it's great doing the Indian.

He's so nasty sometimes.

I don't get to do it in real life, so I've got to get to do it somewhere.

So get rid of your frustrations...

It does manage to do that. But it makes my wife [actress Shari Belafonte] wonder sometimes.

What does she say when she sees you on the show?

How I can do such terrible things, and do it so convincingly. She thinks there's a mean streak in me that's waiting to come out. I think over the last 10 years, she knows better.

What's going to happen to Gregory next? Is he ever going to find out what happened to his baby? Do you know anything about that yet?

Of course not. They don't tell us anything. I don't know. When I want to find something out about the show, I go on the Internet. They usually seem to know more than we do!

I've got to tell you, I really love your scenes with Lesley-Anne Down (Olivia).

Thanks.

The two of you have such tremendous onscreen chemistry. I've missed that while she's been on maternity leave.

Me too. It's difficult not to have chemistry when I'm doing a scene with her.

Actually, you seem to do well onscreen with everybody. You seem to be the energy that's moving everybody along and motivating them.

Thank you. That's very nice of you to say. Spread the word!

Hey, we're trying. I love SB.

That is a high compliment. All it means, if it's true, is that I'm putting my attention on the story.

Gregory has quite a sorry domestic situation, to say the least. He doesn't really get along with his kids. He doesn't trust his wife.

He doesn't get along with his kids because his kids have such screwy ideas. You know, bad guys don't do bad. They're looking out to do good. It just looks to the rest of the world like they're doing bad. The example was Hitler, who was doing good for Germany, or so he thought. The rest of the world saw that he was a menace to society. How many killings have there been in the name of God? Or Jesus Christ, I should say, but we won't get into that. That's not for [TVGEN].

We get into all sorts of things with TVGEN.

I'll bet you do. [Laughs] But the point is, often what we think is a quest for doing the right thing [is] for ourselves, and we lose sight of how it affects other people, and what we're really doing and what we're really looking like. In turn... if you're putting out bad [stuff], that's what you're going to get back.

That seems to be what happened to Gregory.

He always gets it back.

But he always handles it so well.

That's so good, too. It's so good that somebody so in control gets stuff put in his face.

He's one of the most delicious characters on the show, one of the best-written characters.

Bob Guza, who originally created these people, did a splendid job of saying how they would interact.

You seem to be having the most fun.

It's fun to play pretend. It's fun to do that stuff. It's fun to be the power. I walk on the set, actually, when new people come in; especially new, young, pretty girls; and I go, "You know, I'm very rich. I have a really big limousine."

Too bad that's Gregory and not Sam.

No. I don't think I'd do well with a very big limousine. Very rich, I could get along with. But not the way Gregory is.

Let's switch gears. Are you doing anything else right now besides Sunset?

Oh, goodness, no. I'm too busy to do anything.

You seem to be on three or four days a week.

Just about every day. I got a little break because Lesley-Anne was away. Now she's back, and by the way, I don't believe she ever had this baby! I think she was just conning so she could get time off. She looks much too exquisite. They had a big meeting with all the network executives, head writers and producers, and I just barged into the room and said, "She never had her baby. Come on! Look at her! That bitch!" and I walked right out [laughs].

How did she take it?

I said it to her, too. The first time I saw her was on the set yesterday. I walked right up to her and said that and started screaming at her. She loved it. She started screaming at me. Then we hugged.

It's too bad that you're not involved in anything else right now. Do you have any plans for anything?

I'm always involved in what I'm doing today, so that's not a put-off. Especially with a job like this. There's no time to even think about what you're going to do tomorrow. Especially when you're in every day. You have no days off. Your entire life is based around the soap. In fact, when the job came along, I had to warn my wife about that. Thatit would be different. My entire life would be centered around this "silly" job. And indeed that's the case. I've seen very good, strong-willed people fall apart because of things like this. Working five days a week, and shooting 13 scenes a day, and all that other stuff. It's a lot of work, unless you're really up to the challenge, and the challenge takes many forms in daytime. It's not just "I memorize my lines, and I stand on my mark. Whatever it is, I'll be OK." It just doesn't work that way.

Definitely not, but you do seem to do it very well.

Thank you.

If you had any input into these things, and I know most actors don't have any input, what would you like to see Gregory do next?

Much to the producers' credit, by the way, there's probably more input here than I've seen anywhere. They actually listen. It's not just, "OK, tell me."I dropped a couple of ideas they used. And not necessarily about my story. But where would I like to see it go? It's hard to say right now because, the way I feel, as long as Gregory continues to be this gila monster; not just Snidely Whiplash, which is what I thought from the beginning; as long as he remains a human being and a monster, I think I'll be happy. It's when they start doing this stereotype stuff; I get no joy out of that. There's much more job [satisfaction] in revealing the monster in all of us. Or the humanness in the monster. We have this idea that these monsters are born evil. No, they're not. They're human beings, and any average human being is capable of doing the same things. What keeps them from doing it is their upbringing and their morals.

One thing that I've noticed about SB ; and you can correct me if I'm wrong; there seems to be a strong esprit de corps. Like, "We're all in this together. We know we're facing hard odds, but we've got to get this thing together." Do you feel that?

Absolutely. I've never seen more individuals together all dedicated to that. There's a lot less of "Ah, I'm just going to do my job, get paid and get the hell out of here." I remember going out for dinner, and I happened to sit next to this woman who's a friend of mine who's doing another soap, and I said, "You know, I can't believe the challenge that I've missed doing daytime before. It presents a challenge every day if you're up to it, up to doing good work and all that. It's very fulfilling." She looked at me like I was crazy.

I know daytime actors who truly feel it is the toughest kind of acting. You have the least preparation and the most to do every week. You've got to do it, get it right the first time and hope for the best. A lot of people outside of the industry don't understand that.

They almost never do. I jokingly talk about how I feel sorry for my friends doing film because they never know really how good they are. You can take an orangutan and do 40 takes, put it together, and it looks like a scene. You can't do that in daytime. Whatever is there is what you get. And as a result... there's no time to rehearse. No time to hone. No time to even work at home because you get off at 8;p.m. and have to be on the set in the morning and do 60 pages. It's one thing doing film; you've got a page to do tomorrow or you don't, and you have all this time in between to work on this page. When I was on GH, there was a guy who came in who was a regular nighttime star at one time, a good actor who came on the show. They had this long monologue for him almost the first day he was there, and I kid you not, it was take 27 of this same scene. He was a wreck. This stuff'll do it to you. There's going to be shining moments, too.

A soaps executive producer once told me, "Look, I'm producing two and a half feature films a week in terms of the incredible amount of time it takes. Nobody understands that outside of this business."

I had a big argument with an actress friend of mine who said, "The worst actors are in daytime!" And I don't even take it personally, because it's just out of ignorance. If she had said the worst acting is indaytime, I could go along with it, because time does not permit anybody to have the kind of quality that we'd like. It's like doing summer stock, and you can't compare summer stock to a Broadway show. It's tough.

Absolutely. I have tremendous respect for anybody who can do it day in and day out.

I have tremendous respect for anyone who does this and still comes in to do the work. We do the best we can.

There's some excellent work at SB right now, and it's kind of infuriating at this end to know there's no audience watching it.

Of course you fall into that conundrum of seeing numbers, and you don't think people are watching. We are on a number system, and the numbers are important, and I'm not trying to elevate [the show] to anything it isn't. Obviously there are shows that get much bigger audiences, and that's reflected in the numbers. The mistake, I think, is to look at the low numbers and think people aren't watching. That's not true. We have fans who are fanatics about it. "What's going on next at Sunset Beach?" Because we skew to a younger audience, I don't know that we'll ever have the audience that certainly a Young and the Restless has until our audience starts to grow up.

What's your wife doing these days?

She's producing a movie for Showtime, which she just got a final script for. It's a black cowboy story. She's got a line of eyeglasses. She's gota diet-system thing. That woman's always busy. But we still manage to spend time together. A lot of time.

Would you like to work with her again?

I'm sure we will. I hope she's producing.

If she's producing she can hire you.

I think that's really what she wants to do. She's got a great talent for it. She's a great schmoozer. Shari walks into a room and everybody turns around. And it's not just the way she looks. I mean, you talk to her for a little while, and you're in love.

I bet you consider yourself very lucky in that regard.

Very lucky. Almost as lucky as she is! Something very funny happened once. There was a friend of ours who had a young sister or cousin visiting. Pretty young girl. And she said to Shari's friend, "Oh, poor Shari." The friend says, "What are you talking about?" She says, "He's got women falling all over him! Poor Shari. She's got to live with that."