Bryan Dattilo on His New Physique and Return to DAYS

Bryan R. Dattilo is back as DAYS’s Lucas Horton, a lighter, leaner version of himself. Since his last appearance on the soap, Dattilo has embarked on a new health and fitness regimen. “I’ll tell you what triggered it,” Dattilo begins candidly. “I was on a public appearance and one of the fans asked if they could ask me a couple of questions. I said, ‘Sure.’ One of them was, ‘Do you wear a fat suit [on the show]?’ ”

Although Dattilo joked that he did on occasion, he quickly realized it was no laughing matter. “It was the fat suit question from the fan that made me say, ‘You know what? I can’t do it any more,’ ” he shares, admitting that he was “almost 190 pounds at the time. Then I saw a picture of myself from the PA, and I thought, ‘I am big.’ We all have our comfort zones and non-comfort zones. Once you get out of your comfort zone, you should do something about it and make sure it sticks, which is the hard part.”

So Dattilo began tackling his burgeoning weight head on. “I went home and decided to start by doing these 100 days of working out videos,” he adds, posting his progress on Instagram. “I would take my shirt off and be honest. I’d work out in jeans and say, ‘I have 30 pounds to lose, and this is how I’m going to do it.’ And that was it. When you do something like that, it makes you accountable, so you have to do it.”

The videos consisted of exercises Dattilo performed at home. “I have equipment in my garage,” he explains. “I have a bench. I have free weights and hand weights. I have a jagged barbell. I have 25-pound plates. I showed videos there where I did leg curls, bench presses and flies. I used different positioning to work out my triceps, biceps and shoulders.”

He also hit the gym. “I do go when I need to do cable work, because I don’t have cables,” continues Dattilo. “But as far as ab work and working your core, that’s something you can do every day at home. You can do things like planks, sit-ups, scissors and bicycle scissors. There are a lot of oblique turns that I do with this thing I call ‘the fat stick’. I used to take that stick to DAYS all the time. Alison Sweeney [ex-Sami] used to make fun of me. She’d say, ‘Is that the fat stick?’ It’s a lighter-weight wood stick that I put duct tape over. I put it behind my head and do oblique turns. I do 25 turns on each side. You can do a lot with that stick, because it stretches you out. It kind of aligns you, too, and keeps you even when you do things, which is important so your muscles develop evenly. You can do lunges with the stick and dips and squats. You can do a lot of stuff with it.”

For the most part, Dattilo stuck to his original 100-day workout goal. “I kept with it,” he says. “Then I got to day 53 and lost the streak, but I got right back on it. The key was to give myself a long marker to kind of change things; to not only be more active, but to also eat better. I set a really good eating pattern for myself, and I lost about 30 pounds. When I tell people I lost 30 pounds, they’re like, ‘Dude, you weren’t that big.’ But I was. The scale doesn’t lie. I was 187 when I started. When I finished [the 100 days] I was 164. Now I’m 160.”

The actor is also an advocate of weighing yourself daily. “I used to hate to weigh myself,” he admits. “But if you don’t weigh yourself for a couple of months, you don’t realize where things have gone — and how far they could go.”

Dattilo encouraged his Instagram followers to come along on his shape up journey. “I invited everyone to join in,” he says. “I shared videos of me making protein shakes and salads — what I mix together. And I kind of gave my [eating] and workout tips.”

Since reaching his goal, Dattilo couldn’t be happier. “It’s a relief not to worry about [my weight], because I know what to stay away from. I know when it’s time to eat what my options are, and I’m not tempted by things,” he insists. “You can cheat, but you’ve got to know what to do [afterward]. You’ve got to work a little harder the next couple of days to not let it snowball. So it kind of becomes not worth it. You’re like, ‘Why am I eating this burger?’”

Dattilo believes that fans will notice the difference in his physique on camera, spilling that he’s filmed a couple of story arcs since beginning the whole process. “It gets better and better,” he says. “If I have the goatee, I’m thin. It kind of goes hand in hand with the goatee. I don’t know why.”

While he can’t reveal exactly what happens on screen during any of those story arcs, Dattilo will say that he just finished one that he thoroughly enjoyed. “I had a really good arc for a couple of weeks that I just got done with,” he shares. “I flirt with getting out of jail. It’s a cool storyline, and I got to work with people that I’d never worked with before, which was great. It was a really cool arc, the best arc I’ve had in a while. Now I’m kind of in a holding pattern until something else happens.”

For Dattilo, that holding pattern involves “doing the dad thing and taking care of everything. I do so much myself. I don’t let a lot of people do a lot of my house stuff, so I’m always busy doing that, which I like. I like being there for my family. That makes me feel good. Who I am is the guy at home — dad, grandpa, pool guy, lawn guy, handyman, therapist, maid, dog walker … I even cook now. I’ve been doing a lot of good cooking. I’m into my air fryer. It cooks things in half the time, everything comes out perfect, and the cleanup is easy.”

Dattilo’s wife, Liz, is a substitute teacher, so she is home at 4. “I think she likes her time in the kitchen,” he says. “She kind of unwinds chopping onions and ignoring me, in a good way. But she’ll call me sometimes and say, ‘Start cutting vegetables. Start cooking that, and I’ll do the meat when I get home.’ It’s teamwork. We’re actually good at the teamwork thing.”

The couple, who celebrated their 12th wedding anniversary in July, has a lot to be grateful for. Topping the list is the fact that Liz, who completed treatment for breast cancer in 2021, has remained “in remission … cancer-free, thank God,” says Dattilo. “And the family is doing well.”

Their nine-year-old daughter, Delila, continues to follow in her father’s footsteps. “She wasn’t able to book anything during the strike, so she got into theater, which she loves,” confides Dattilo. “She did Seussical: The Musical and Bye Bye Birdie. She is really into musical theater and rehearsing. She doesn’t get tired of it. She sings and dances and knows all the numbers. I’m not pushing her at all. I would never force my daughter to be an actress or even want her to be one, really. But she just loves it so much. She has a passion for it.”

Meanwhile, Dattilo’s 23-year-old son, Gabe, from his first marriage, remains close to his dad. “He comes over every weekend and brings the baby, his son Alexander,” reveals Dattilo, who’s totally embraced being a first-time grandfather to the 2-year-old. “It’s the best. The baby would rather be with his dad and hang out, but I’m growing on him. He’s taking to me. He knows I’ll give him anything he wants to eat, so that he loves. I let him throw my chess pieces all over. He loves doing that. He’s really into stacking things. So he’ll stack the chess pieces after throwing them all over the living room floor.” Delila enjoys being an aunt to the toddler. “Oh, she’s all over him,” gushes Dattilo. “She thinks of him like a doll. She likes to pick him up, but she’s not that much bigger than him. And he doesn’t like being picked up. She’s great with him, very patient.”

While his life on the home front is clearly thriving, Dattilo admits that he does miss acting more regularly. “That’s a fun part about my life, and I do enjoy it,” he acknowledges. “I get to play somebody else for a while, an alter ego. It’s two identities.” And he looks back on his 30-year run with the show reflectively. “I’ve had times when the job takes over your life. You’re working five days a week, and you don’t see anybody at home. You don’t have time to appreciate what you have. That’s not easy. That is hard. That hurts. But you also don’t have to worry about the bills, when you have that. So there’s a trade off. You can’t have it all.”

But he’s always thrilled when he gets the call to return to DAYS. “I love it. It’s what I do,” concludes Dattilo. “As long as it’s for a fun cool arc, where I’ll have a lot to play around with, [I’m in]. The last two [returns] have been the best I’ve had, since I’ve been on this coming and going thing for the last 10 or 15 years. The last two storylines that I had, I was really happy with.”