DAYS’s Linsey Godfrey On Sarah Preparing For Custody War With Xander (Exclusive)

Deny, Deny, Deny: Xander (Paul Telfer) may not be facing charges from the Salem PD, but Sarah (Linsey Godfrey) isn’t buying his innocent act.

After Philip regains consciousness on Days of Our Lives and announces that Xander isn’t the person who attacked him, Sarah and Belle are both stunned — and both women refuse to believe it.

“Sarah 100 percent thinks that Xander is the person that beat Philip up,” insists Linsey Godfrey (Sarah). She is so convinced of this, in fact, that Sarah tossed Xander (Paul Telfer) out of Philip’s hospital room when she found him there when Philip woke up. “She was like, ‘You cannot be in here. You’re the person who did this.’ Also, the hospital is the one place where you see Sarah be really strict, because she and Kayla run it. They’re the ones in charge. So it was really like, ‘You stepped into my office, and you’re misbehaving. Absolutely not.’ ”

Big Fat Liar

Sarah and Xander later discuss Philip exonerating Xander, with Sarah not yet privy to the fact that her estranged husband threatened to reveal Philip’s letter forgery if Philip didn’t clear his name. “The way it was written and the way I played it was, ‘I know [Philip is] lying,’ ” shares Godfrey. “I didn’t want that easily gullible thing. So I kept it as, ‘Sure. I know you’re lying. He’s lying. And anybody else that tells me this story is lying.’ That’s how I played it the whole time.”

Yet, with Philip’s lie having just the effect Xander desired — getting the charges against him dropped — he is now free to pursue shared custody of his Victoria, his daughter with Sarah. daughter, Victoria, thanks to Philip’s big fat lie. “There’s not a whole lot of cross talk between Sarah and Philip about the custody situation with Victoria,” notes Godfrey. “But I’m sure there’s an element of her that’s like, ‘Why can’t you just tell the truth?’ ”

It certainly would have made life easier for Sarah, “because Sarah doesn’t want Xander to have 50-50 custody of their daughter,” contends Godfrey. “She’s just too afraid of the variables that come with being alone with Xander and with being attached to Xander.”

Those variables weren’t something that Sarah gave much thought to when she and Xander were a blissfully happy couple. “As long as Xander had Sarah, Maggie and Victoria in his life — and they were all together — everybody was safe, because they surrounded Xander with good and all different kinds of options,” explains Godfrey. “You had good mommy, good wife, good baby.”

But that all changed when Xander went rogue and beat up Philip, alienating the two most important women in his life: Sarah and Maggie. “This is the first time that you saw Maggie not defend Xander to Sarah,” notes Godfrey. “Usually Maggie’s trying to get Sarah to calm down, because Maggie loves Xander so much. She has this almost maternal love for him. He’s her son in a way. But for the first time, Maggie really was not coming to his defense.”

Without the goodness and guidance of Sarah and Maggie in his life, Xander seems destined to give in to his worst instincts, which has only given Sarah more reason to worry. “That was Sarah’s entire thought process when it came to the whole situation with Philip in the first place,” expounds Godfrey. “[With Philip as co CEO of Titan] at least he could be a speed bump in the decisions that Xander made, because Xander is somebody that is hot to anger, hot to action, and big anger and big action. Sarah knows that she and Maggie have always been Xander’s North Star of goodness, essentially. So now there’s the fear of, ‘Oh God. What will he do if nobody is holding him accountable?’ ”

 

Sarah does have a conversation with Philip about how Xander learned she knew about his forged letter. “She asks him, ‘Are you the one who told him?’ And he doesn’t tell her the truth,” details Godfrey, noting that Sarah’s patience with Philip is wearing thin. “Sarah’s been annoyed with Philip from the start. The idea that he showed up with a forged letter in the first place to take half of Xander’s inheritance annoyed her. The way everything has gone since is annoying. She finds Philip to be sneaky and underhanded. Sarah’s very annoyed with him always. I don’t know that Sarah and Phillip have ever been cool with each other, even when it was years ago, and it was the Jay [Kenneth] Johnson iteration of Philip. I think Sarah has always been slightly annoyed by Philip.”

Unfortunately, Philip has become more than an annoyance. Now he’s the person whose lie is forcing Sarah to have to fight Xander for custody of Victoria. What can viewers expect from that battle? “There will definitely be a back and forth about what Sarah and Xander want to do, and lawyers will be getting involved, so there are kind of the ups and downs of that,” muses Godfrey. “They’ll have moments of agreeing, and then things will go wrong.”