Interview: Eva LaRue: CSI: Miami Star
by Scott Juba
Published: September 19, 2005
Over the years, many soap opera actors have left daytime television with the hopes of making it big in primetime. Vanessa Marcil, Kelly Ripa, and Josh Duhamel are a few of the actors who have successfully made that transition. Now, Eva LaRue also joins that list. After spending several years on “All My Children,” LaRue currently stars alongside David Caruso and Emily Procter on the hugely popular “CSI: Miami.”
“I was nervous about coming into an established show,” she tells me. “It has such a huge following, and because this is their fourth season, I thought that maybe they wouldn’t be very open to a new person, but they have been so warm and lovely and welcoming.”
On the show, LaRue’s character is the new head of the crime lab, and as a result of a substantial federal grant, she brings several high tech gadgets with her. “My little tension area with the rest of the cast is that my character is only allowed to work on cold cases,” she says. “They’re going to want to use all my toys for their current cases, and they can’t.”
Coming from a soap opera, memorizing large amounts of dialogue is nothing new for LaRue. The technical nature of her character’s dialogue, however, does challenge her. “The dialogue that I had to deliver in my audition scene was insane,” she says with a laugh. “You’re trying to act in another language. It’s memorization to the nth degree.”
LaRue admits that prior to being asked to join the cast of “CSI: Miami,” she had never seen the show. “I had never seen it before, and then they sent me the whole first season, and I became a junky,” she says. “Now I’m waiting for my second season to come in the mail. I feel left hanging in the lurch waiting to find out what’s going to happen the next season.”
Although LaRue’s role on “CSI: Miami” is by far, the biggest break of her career, it’s not her first stint on primetime TV. She previously had a recurring role on “Third Watch.” Although she fondly recalls her time on that show, it did not help her to prepare for her current role. “I didn’t have any [technical] dialogue to perform on that show,” she says. “I was working in the same facet of the industry being that Third Watch was a nighttime [law enforcement] drama, but CSI: Miami has an aura about it. It’s like working in another realm. It’s not like [working on] shows that are struggling to stay on the air. There’s always a nervous tension on shows like that. CSI: Miami has none of that. They’re very confident, and they know exactly what they’re doing. It’s lovely.”
Working on CSI: Miami has also given LaRue the opportunity to return to her home state of California. And even during all the years she worked in New York at “All My Children,” she always remained a California girl at heart. “As much as I loved the fall and spring on the east coast, I couldn’t get used to the winters on the east coast,” she says. “It seems like the winters have been worse the last three years. They seem to get longer and colder. After a pretty good size car accident in a blizzard last year while I was trying to get to work, I said, ‘Okay. One more year and I’m out of here!’ [Laughs].”
And while LaRue has fled the Big Apple for the California sun, with her breakout role on “CSI: Miami,” she will continue to gain popularity from coast to coast.
Official Site: CSI: Miami
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