Katie Barberi fans will get the opportunity to watch the novela star in a completely different role when she plays herself as host of Lessons in Lust, a weeklong encore presentation of some of Investigation Discovery's most scandalous series, including Wives with Knives, My Dirty Little Secret, Scorned: Love Kills and Evil Twins. 

Barberi, whose episodes will air Sept. 2-5, joins  General Hospital's Lynn Herring and Kin Shriner; Days of our Lives' Mary Beth Evans and Wally Kurth; bad boys Lamon Archey from The Young and the Restless and Darnell Williams from All My Children in this second annual ID Daytime programming event.

The Doña Bárbara star, who has 17 novelas to her credit, took time out to chat about how special the hosting gig was to her because she was a huge fan of ABC daytime dramas growing up, and her new U.S. Nickelodeon series Every Witch Way. Check out what she had to say below.

Tell me about your week of episodes, Lessons in Lust?

The week that I am hosting is about love stories gone wrong. It is a lot of fun because I've played a lot of those characters. When people see you in telenovelas, they say, "How could it be possible that this woman could be so into this man that she would this or this? That they would kill, or lie about such and such?" It is taken from life. So, I think, it is a lot of fun to have these real-life crime shows on and say, "We've seen it happen."

What was it that made you want to host it?

I am just going to say straight up what happened. I am a huge fan of the daytime soap opera genre. I started in telenovelas when I was 21 years old. I began my career as an actress when I was 10 in L.A.

but it was strictly anglo, save for a couple of commercials I did in Spanish.

Then Televisa decided to do an experiment and sell the telenovela genre, which as we know lasts 6 to 8 months, airs every night of the week, and has a beginning, a middle and an end. That is the biggest difference between soap operas and telenovelas. No. 1: they are primetime. No. 2: they have a beginning, middle and an end, and they run every night over a period of time.

They wanted to try and experiment shooting a telenovela in English. So, they cast me as the antagonist of one of those, which in English was called Acapulco Bay. They brought the cast down to Mexico. The only thing that was different [from the Spanish-language version] was the wardrobe, the cast and the director.  

As soon as I got down there and the casting director found out that I had Mexican roots on my dad's side of the family, they offered me a contract with Televisa to start shooting telenovelas in Spanish.  I was, "Yo no hablo muy bien el español." I had been raised in the United States and I did not speak Spanish that well to do television. They put me in a special course for diction… In six months, I was speaking Spanish as if I had been born and raised in Mexico, when I was merely born there.

While I was raised in the United States, it was soap operas I was into, not telenovelas. I was an avid All My Chidlren, One Life to Live, General Hospital watcher. Every single day. So when Investigation Discovery contacted me sometime around October 2013 and said, "We are interested in having Katie be a part of this project," I had really no idea what it was until I started looking online and saw that it was the project with soap actors, who I had loved and adored my entire life.

When we finally made the deal and they sent me the storyboard, I didn't care what week I was hosting. That was the least of my concern. I couldn't believe that I was working with Darnell Williams, Wally Kurth, Kin Shriner and Lynn Herring. When we got there, we had separate promos to shoot, so the actors had different call times at different parts of the day. So, when I got into makeup, I said, "Who is here?" They said, "Darnell Williams is here." I said, "I need to meet Mr. Williams." To meet him was so huge for me. I asked him if he would mind, and we called my mother, who had been watching him for 30 years. It was a huge moment for me. Maybe it was a nice experience for him to have somebody who he wasn't expecting to be excited about meeting him, as I was.

You have done so many novelas, what is your favorite kind of storyline? Is it revenge? Unrequited love?

Right now, I'm on Every Witch Way for Nickelodeon and that is the craziest story ever. In the midst of my doing these telenovelas -- I have now done 17 of them --  Nickelodeon Latin America contacted me and asked, "Would you be interested in performing this very special performance role on a children's telenovela for Latin America called Grachi? She is the mother of the lead, mean, teen witch." I always thought it would be cool to be a part of a youth project, so I accepted the role. I had no idea it would grow the way it did.

I thought, "What if Ursula is not just a mean witch?" So, I started adding in elements from comediennes that I have always admired, like Lisa Kudrow, Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall, Debra Messing, Lucille Ball, and, obviously, Carol Burnett, and taking these elements and making her not as mean but oblivious. So I started playing her like [demonstrates funny voice]. Grachi became a huge success in international sales. So, when they decided to do it in English, they came to me to do the role. Getting the role was huge, because [my career] has come full circle. Now, I am in a show using the telenovela genre, like they tried to do 20 years ago at Televisa.

Ursula is all about herself, she's completely selfish. She'd like to be a witch, like her daughter, but she can't handle it. It is too much for her. It's skipped a generation. She's obsessed with shoes, clothing and jewelry and she's a lot of fun to play because, at the base,  she's a villainess like the dark characters I've played in telenovelas in the past…. I've been able to explore that same kind of character but in comedy.

The episodes of Lessons in Lust you are hosting are based on real-life crimes. Why should your fans tune in?

Because they will get to see real people doing what I've done thousands of time in the shows that they love, with me hosting it and guiding them through the process. It is always interesting. It will justify the avid telenovela and soap opera fan, who may be criticized by someone who is not a fan of the genre, for watching what is called "heightened reality." It will give them the opportunity to say, "See it really happens." And it does. Writers aren't making this up.

The Lessons in Lust week airs in conjunction with ID's evening primetime return of a new season of Deadly Affairs with Susan Lucci,  featuring all-new stories of deadly dalliances on Saturdays at 10/9c on Investigation Discovery.