Paula Cale: Big Girls Do Cry

Crying on a weekly basis on the NBC drama Providence has been downright therapeutic for star Paula Cale.

"I think if all of us had to make ourselves cry over something once a day we'd all probably be much more balanced and happy," the actress tells TV Guide Online. "It's always interesting to me to see what pushes my buttons. I think it's a very healthy thing."

Still, crying Cale admits it can sometimes be pretty rough switching emotional gears on the set. "The hardest part is [when] you get something in your mind, and you're very emotionally involved, and then you hear, 'Cut!' And then it's like, 'OK, where are we going for lunch?' And I'm like, 'What? I'm a wreck over here!' So that gets difficult."

Cale recently had to cry through virtually an entire episode and was completely exhausted after a week's worth of shooting on the Universal lot. By the last day of the shoot, which wrapped at about 3 am, the actress found herself crying the whole way home while driving on L.A.'s 405 Freeway. "And I didn't know why," she says. "But I was just so tired, and I was so emotionally drained, that I was just gone."

Now that production has wrapped for the season, Cale says she's planning to relax by spending a lot of time sitting on the beach reading every book from Oprah Winfrey's book club. "I'm going to go to Greece with my sister, who has to go for her work, and just relax," she says.