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Playing The Part: Raven Bowens as Chanel as Faith on DAYS, opposite Robert Scott Wilson as Alex as Arrow.
Having to create a soap character, Body and Soul’s Faith, within the realm of the character she already portrays on Days of our Lives, Chanel, was a fun undertaking for actress Raven Bowens.
Keeping Faith
“The way that I tried to approach it was very traditional soap opera,” explains Bowens. “I wanted Faith to feel not current. I wanted her to feel like she was from before. So I tried to give her a Southern accent and make her into a Southern belle.”
Bowens’s interpretation of Faith apparently aligned with the show’s vision for the character. “I didn’t tell anyone I was going to do [the accent], but no one said anything when I did,” recalls Bowens. “I think I kind of surprised everyone when I first popped out with it. I remember Rob [Scott Wilson, Alex] saying, ‘Oh, that was really cool.’ So people were not expecting it. I don’t even know if I was expecting it! But it came out and it flowed.”
In addition to Faith’s Southern charm, she also envisioned a specific look for the character. “I wanted to dress her a little bit more flowy or flowery or silky, just very soft. I wanted to make it feel like she was pulled from another time,” explains Bowens, who collaborated with costume designer Richard Bloore on creating that look.
“Richard and I talked about it, because it was written that the first outfit she wore was a sundress,” continues Bowens. “So he bought these really gorgeous sundresses, and that was also a bit of what inspired me to make Faith the way that I wanted her to be. When I would go upstairs and we would choose wardrobe, we would have conversations about it. I said that I didn’t want to dress Faith like Chanel, and Richard immediately knew what I meant. And then the options that he was bringing in, because his vision was old school soap and my vision was Southern belle, we kind of blended those two. We created her look.”
There was only one part of Bowens’s vision that she wasn’t able to implement into Faith. “I wanted to play with the hair, too,” making it distinct from how Chanel wears hers, “but we didn’t have a lot of time,” she says. “We were going back and forth from Faith to Chanel, so we didn’t have a lot of time to show that transition through hair and makeup. So that just had to be what it was going to be.”
