Kassie DePaiva was already known to soap audiences as Guiding Light‘s Chelsea Reardon when the opportunity to play Blair Cramer on One Life to Live came her way in 1993. “I had left Guiding Light in ’91, gone out to Los Angeles to try to make my way and maybe do some nighttime stuff,” she recalls. “In that time period, I had auditioned and screen-tested for a part on Another World — I think it was a character named Amanda — but I didn’t get it. And then this audition for Blair came up and I thought, ‘Oh, wow, this would be great. Do I want to move back to New York?’ Yes, I wanted to, because I was not in a good place in my personal life with a marriage and I just wanted to work.” 

At the time she auditioned for the show, DePaiva was unaware that the show was taking the character in a different direction from her predecessor, Mia Korf. “I had no idea it was controversial until after I’d had a couple of callbacks,” she explains. “Someone said, ‘You know you’re replacing an Asian American actress.’ And I’m like, ‘What?’ I didn’t even think I would be considered, but three auditions later, I’m packing my bags and moving to New York and playing this character called Blair and it changed my life.”