Vincent Irizarry Pays Loving Tribute To The Late Great David Canary

 

Handsome actor Vincent Irizarry has been thrilling soap fans across the dial in his various soap roles. Along the way, he has worked with some of the best in the business — including multiple Daytime Emmy winner David Canary, who played opposite him on All My Children when Irizarry played David Hayward. Recently the actor was asked about the experience of working with the late daytime legend, who passed away in 2015.

Vincent Irizarry Remembers David Canary

Irizarry recently took part in a Fantasy Events gathering via Zoom with a large group of supporters. One attendee, Leslie, asked if he would share his thoughts on the legendary David Canary. Irizarry was eager to reply.

“I looked at David Canary, from the moment I met him — David is like the salt of the earth,” he began. “David was a wonderful human being, so gentle, so sweet, so kind, and attentive to the people around him. I’ve said this several times, that there are people on All My Children that by soap opera standards certainly had the cache, the presence, that if they wanted to be, they could be divos or divas. Cause I worked on some shows where some of the actors were that way. That was not like that on All My Children. David Canary was one of those people that certainly had earned the right to be that if he wanted to be but he couldn’t have been more gracious to everybody he worked with – the crew, the actors, the people that were there. And I loved working with David. We had a great working relationship together.”

Canary played twins in Pine Valley — Adam Chandler and his brother Stuart Chandler. It was early on in his AMC run, which began in 1997, that Irizarry got the chance to work with the gifted actor.

“My first time working with him,” revealed Irizarry, “I had only been hired for three months on the job, on All My Children at that time. One day I got three scripts that were all scenes with David and we were shooting them all in one day and the reason why is because David, as you know David played Adam and also Stuart. So we were going to be shooting these scenes with him playing both roles so there was going to be a stand-in for him when he was Adam or a stand-in for him when he was Stuart.”

That process can take a long time. “So it was literally five hours of us on the same set doing all of these scenes,” continued Vincent Irizarry, “one after the next after the next — two times — and me performing with his stand-in and me performing with him. I swear, after the five hours, I remember going home and saying to my wife at the time, I feel like I just sat in on a Master Class with him. He was so brilliant, working with him and he was from the first day working with him, all the way to the end. He was such a sweet, dear, loving, gracious man.”