“It’s fun to play this person who I’m nothing like,” says Beyond the Gates star Timon Kyle Durrett of his alter ego, Bill Hamilton, the charming cheater who has already caused drama aplenty in Fairmont Crest.
For Durrett, who had racked up a slew of primetime credits over the course of his 25-year career, including playing disgraced basketball star Davis West on OWN’s Queen Sugar, the opportunity to join the new daytime soap was a welcome call. “A lot of people say I get typecast as the bad guy,” Durrett notes. “I don’t know if this guy’s a bad guy, but when I saw some of the material, I said, ‘Yeah, I want to play this guy.’ It was exciting. I’m the opposite of who Bill is. Anyone on set will tell you I’m the big jokester, I tell crazy stories and dad jokes and stuff, and then I transform into him.”
While Bill hasn’t won any husband of the year awards for leaving Dani Dupree (Karla Mosley) to marry their daughter’s pal, Hayley Lawson (Marquita Goings), Durrett appreciates the inner workings of his new character. “Bill is a bit of a shark of a man,” he observes. “You know how a shark will circle its prey and put the fin out of the water and let you know I could take you down? He has no problem with asserting himself and I can’t do it in real life, but to be able to play it in the world of Beyond the Gates is so much fun. And I like Bill. He has soft spots for his daughters and his wife, but for everyone else, man, this dude is sandpaper and thorns. He can be a bit abrasive and aggressive if he needs to be. He definitely mixes it up.”
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Durrett screen-tested with Mosley, who plays Bill’s ex, Dani, and the two had an immediate connection. “She’s a consummate professional,” he lauds. “She’s like a supercomputer the way she retains information, and she can come on the fly and has all these levels and all these different flavors that she adds to her performance. Karla and I met on this show, but there’s a connection that Timon and Karla have created for Dani and Bill, and it’s magical, it seems. It’s like two tennis players who have never played against one another, but they’re both professionals and they’re very good. If we’re going at each other, she knows how to do it with a level of balance and charisma and energy and spite and spunk. It’s like she’s the master chef in the scene,s and it’s refreshing to work with someone who just knows how to play.”
As for Bill’s current wife, Hayley, Durrett worked with her portrayer in the 2019 film, Everyday but Christmas, but didn’t know she was in the casting pool for BTG. “We had to test read together on Zoom, and when I saw her name pop up, I said, ‘Marquita Goings. I don’t know if there’s more than one,’ ” he explains. “But it was just cool and fun, because on the film, I had just met her, but we were already having fun, and I’m being the big, goofy, silly guy that I can be. We just reconnected, and it’s like we were in a time capsule, and we started right where we left off.”
Prior to joining BTG, Durrett’s only other daytime experience was playing an orderly on The Young and the Restless in 2004, which turned out to be a memorable gig for unforeseen reasons. “I had read for Young and the Restless before, and when I went in, the casting assistant said, ‘Have a seat, [the casting director will] be right in,’ ” he recalls. “I sat down, she came in, we read, and she was like, ‘Oh, my God! You’re perfect for this part. I’m calling your agent right now.’ And I stood up and she said, ‘Oh, no! How tall are you?’ I am 6’5” but I tried to play it and said, 6’4”, and she’s like, ‘This isn’t going to work,’ because the actress — I don’t know who it was —was only 4 feet, 10 inches tall.”
Fortunately, that wasn’t the end of his Genoa City journey. “They called me back because they needed a bigger guy to play an orderly, because I had to actually pick up one of the actors on the show, and it was a lot of fun. But that was the same year that Ronald Reagan passed away, and when the episode was airing, breaking news! I was trying to record it, and I only got to see a part of it, and then the rest got cut off. I said, ‘Man, this is my first time I’m on daytime, there’s more people watching, it’s a bigger audience … and unfortunately, the former President passed away. I have not seen the rest of that episode at all.”
Quantrell Colbert/CBS
But it’s a full circle moment to be back on the network where he started his soap journey. “There’s an amalgam of feelings,” Durrett reflects. “It’s a feeling of accomplishment, of welcome. We are the seed that’s going to make the tree of Beyond the Gates grow, and that’s probably the most special part of it, because it doesn’t go any further back than us. We’re at the beginning of it, and it’s exciting.”
As the story continues to unfold, Durrett promises that Bill’s motivations will become clearer. “I do enjoy the angst that Bill causes the fans,” Durrett muses. “People say, ‘Does it bother you?’ I’m like, ‘No, I want them to feel like they don’t know how to feel about Bill.’ He’s an opportunist, but he’s not necessarily a bad person. Bill has a bad temperament because of some things that have happened. I can’t say much, but things have happened with Bill and the Duprees, and he is angry, but for a reason, and he’s having a hard time reconciling and letting it go. It’s not that he’s just this innate jerk.”
And when that revelation comes to light, Durrett teases, “I will say, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
Beyond the Gates, Weekdays, CBS
