DAYS Exclusive: Dan Feuerriegel on Revisiting Sami’s Rape
Revisiting the explosive and controversial Days of Our Lives storyline that aired back in 2008 – Sami’s rape by EJ, who was played at the time by James Scott — was a lesson in uncomfortable history for Dan Feuerriegel, who has played EJ since 2021. In the years since the actor assumed the role, Feuerriegel had become loosely aware of the terrible event. “I had heard [about it],” he says. “I’d seen a few people typing some stuff on social media throughout the years, so I was aware that something went down, but I wasn’t really sure of the specifics.”
Past Tense
Feuerriegel actually didn’t learn the specifics of what happened between EJ and Sami until working on the powerful scenes where Johnny confronted EJ about sexually assaulting his mother. “In the scenes, Johnny told me everything EJ did,” explains Feuerriegel. “So I was kind of like, ‘Well, I don’t need to research it.’ ” In Feuerriegel’s view, that decision affected his performance for the better. “The fact that I didn’t really know too much about it and didn’t really research it [added to] the spontaneity of the scene, where EJ was thrown,” the actor notes. “He was on the back foot [a British expression for being caught off guard]. It made that a lot more natural and easier to play. I was just discovering everything when Carson [Boatman, Johnny] was yelling at me. I was like, ‘Oh. I did that, huh? Sh*t.’ I was finding out all of this in the moment.”
What was it like being on the receiving end of such horrific information and having to react to it? “Well, obviously the content was not fun,” contends Feuerriegel. “But it was fun as an actor to kind of see a little different side to EJ, which is that he had nothing to come back with. There was nothing he could say. There was no way that he could weasel his way out of it. There was no justification [for what he’d done]. The challenge was that EJ had to really firmly believe that he was, shall we say, backed into a corner to get Sami, to do something like that.”
As the story unfolded, Feuerriegel allowed EJ to alternate between an array of emotions from despair to shame to furor to vulnerability. The scenes where the character angrily confronted Kate about revealing this long-kept secret to Johnny were crucial ones, especially when Kate reminded EJ that Sami had to live with what he’d done to her every day — and EJ solemnly responded that he did, too.
“A lot of it just came out in the moment,” muses Feuerriegel. “It made sense to me to kind of show different layers and different tactics and things like that from EJ. I think with EJ, he felt obviously on the back foot, and when he is being pushed up against the wall he’ll attack. So there was this kind of angry, vulnerable justification of like, ‘You are having a go at me, but you don’t think that I have suffered from this as well?’ So he found a kind of [comeback], and it was also a tactic to try and get the focus off of him.”
Nevertheless, Feuerriegel firmly believes that EJ’s mortification is real and that Sami’s rape lingers in the back of his mind and haunts him to this day. And that’s why he opted to convey his character’s shame so passionately. “It creates three dimensions to characters and three dimensions to situations, because nothing is necessarily fully black and white,” asserts Feuerriegel. “There’s different layers and things like that to everything. Also, this storyline gives you permission to kind of be like, ‘All right, let’s try and find some little bits of color to everything.’ And that is what I enjoy bringing to the character.”
No Apology: Kate (Lauren Koslow) showed little remorse for telling Johnny what EJ did to Sami.
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