May 12 marks Deidre Hall’s 5,000th episode on DAYS, and the show, which can be streamed on Peacock, crafted a tribute to the actress. Digest spoke with the actress about the incredible milestone.
Soap Opera Digest: Congratulations on marking 5,000 episodes! What does it mean to you?
Deidre Hall: It’s stunning and I’m so grateful. For a long time, I wanted a home, and here it is.
Digest: After all these years, what do you like about Marlena?
Hall: Oh, Marlena is easy. Marlena has a small handful of fierce qualities that are loyalty, compassion, understanding, patience and generosity, which is exactly what you want in a friend, a mom, a therapist, a neighbor. She’s there, she just shows up.
Digest: What don’t you like about Marlena?
Hall: That she is so even. I don’t really get to play the extreme highs and lows of a situation. But then you’ve got Hattie and then you’ve got possession, so I’ve had a chance to play all of it.
Digest: How is the Marlena we’re seeing today different from the Marlena you began playing in 1976?
Hall: I don’t know that she is different. Once again, it’s back to those five qualities and what she values in her life, and the people she values. She’s unwavering. She really hasn’t changed and that’s what we like about her. She is a predictable friend, and you know what you’ll get when you go there. I think it’s what the audience likes about her. I had so much mail, especially from [Will’s] coming-out story: “If I could just get to Marlena, I know she’d understand.” Oh, it makes me cry. People are hungry for a person in their lives that accepts them, that loves them, that celebrates them regardless of what they bring to the party and that’s who Marlena is.
Digest: Who would you consider to be Marlena’s best friend?
Hall: I’m thinking that maybe it’s Kayla, because of their mutuality and their work environment, and they certainly have had a time together that’s been very important to both of them.
Digest: Which of her children would you say Marlena is closest to?
Hall: I think it’s Belle. Belle is John’s, so there is that intimacy and she’s such a source of pride. She’s solid. She’s a lot of Marlena, and she’s smart and she’s an attorney while being a mom and a wife, so it’s good.
Digest: What life event would you say has had the biggest impact on Marlena’s evolution?
Hall: Samantha’s death, obviously, because it was such a huge loss, and because it was meant to be Marlena, had things gone differently for a minute. And the loss of being able to play with my [real-life] sister [Andrea Hall-Gengler, ex-Samantha] at that point was devastating.
Digest: Who would you say is the love of Marlena’s life?
Hall: Well, clearly everybody would say it was John, but then he was Roman at one point. Because it has been such an evolution and such a trekking through the years, and because John was Roman to begin with, Roman would have been the love of her life when it was Wayne [Northrop]. Somehow, with the writer’s stroke of the pen, it turned out Roman was John and everybody went, “Yes! Thanks for figuring that out for us.” But the trip to Mazatlán [where their identities were revealed in 1991] was so good, just so good for the three of us. A dreamy location.
Digest: You’ve had some great location shoots.
Hall: I really have. I was thinking about the Carmel [CA] shoot, which was with Jed Allan [ex-Don]. We got up there and the weather was just, “Oh, my gosh, what’s gonna happen here?” And that’s when Ken [Corday, executive producer] lived up there and whoever was in charge of that remote shoot called Ken, and Ken came out and he said, “Oh, yeah, give us 45 minutes. It’ll be fine.” I thought, “Who is this man? This is amazing. Is it a famous family trick that they can predict the future?”
Digest: What memories stand out to you as you look back on the enormity of 5,000 episodes?
Hall: There are so many moments that are signposts in my life as well as Marlena’s. I was thinking about Bill [Hayes, Doug] and Susan’s [Seaforth Hayes, Julie] television wedding and what a momentous occasion that was for everyone, and watching them, how they managed it, how they handled it. I’ve learned at Susan’s elbow for years and years. We had the parking lot opened up to fans, and they had a feed in the parking lot so fans could watch the wedding. It was huge. At one point, Susan turned to the church audience, which obviously was going to be the outside audience, too, and said, “I know this is a long time. I know it’s a long show. Thanks for your patience.” I thought, “Oh, I want to be her when I grow up. What an elegant, sensitive thing to do with the responsibility of what you have to do today.” So she’s my hero. I was thinking back to a lot of those things, and I thought about when Annie played Samantha and when her dog, the Great Dane, came to live with us.
Digest: Wait, Phaedra was her real-life dog?
Hall: Yes. Annie had a Great Dane when she arrived in California, and the Great Dane was on the show. Different times, a different era where you could do such things where you had an untrained dog on the set. It has just been amazing, all my years on the show, just the things we’ve dared to try.
Digest: Any others?
Hall: I had done YOUNG AND RESTLESS for a minute [as Barbara] before I did DAYS and I called my agent and I said, “I want to do a soap.” So the part came up and I got it and I was standing on stage watching a scene between Mac [Carey, ex-Tom], Frances [Reid, ex-Alice] and Mary Frann, who played Amanda. I was riveted because oh, my gosh, Macdonald Carey is standing right there. I was meant to come into the scene a moment later and meet Dr. Horton and Alice. He said, “I’d like you to meet Dr. Evans.” And my line is, “Oh, please call me Marlena.” But because I was not used to it, I said, “Oh, please call me Amanda.” And I didn’t understand why they were all so quiet and Mac said, “Darling, she’s Amanda. You’re Marlena.” [Laughs] He was sweet, sweet, sweet.
Digest: How does that feel to take a little walk down memory lane like this?
Hall: Oh, it’s been delicious. It’s been so good, as have the people I’ve come to know and love and respect, and had the great honor and pleasure of working with, from co-stars to great directors. And my deep and abiding love and friendship with Bill and Susan is just the best. And I got to meet H. Weston Taylor through the show. I got a letter from a man in Chester, Pennsylvania, early on and he said, “I turned on the show the other day and I was walking past the TV and I stopped in my tracks. I couldn’t take my eyes off you because you look like my wife.” I said, “Wow.” And so he began writing to me — back when people wrote letters — and we had a long correspondence. Those were the days of THE MIKE DOUGLAS SHOW and Jed and I had won some awards, so we flew to Philadelphia. I said, “How far is Chester?” And they said, “It’s a train ride.” So I called him and I said, “I’m gonna come sit on your front porch.” So I took the train to Chester and H. Weston Taylor. He was a famous, famous painter and did a lot of The Saturday Evening Post covers; he was an extraordinary artist. We spoke on the phone weekly and when I met him, he was 96. I flew back for his 97th birthday. I have a number of his paintings that I have framed in my home. But oh, I got to have a friendship with a 97-year-old man who I adored as a human being and as an artist. So, that’s pretty good.
Digest: What would you consider to be Marlena’s signature storyline?
Hall: Anybody that you would ask would have to say possession because it changed our demographic. When [then-Head Writer] Jim Reilly wrote possession, I got called upstairs for a conversation and he told me that Marlena was possessed by the devil. And Jim was a devout and knowledgeable Catholic, so this was his wheelhouse. He loved it. He created the story, and every beat was precious to him. And it’s what brought in an enormous young audience. I don’t know that we anticipated that, but that was the outcome of that story.
Digest: Is there something you’ve always wanted to do with Marlena that you haven’t gotten to in the 5,000 episodes you’ve done?
Hall: I’m fascinated by sign language. My sister had learned it in her years of teaching special ed; I went to a junior college and took three years of sign language. I don’t know how that would be to play an arc with that, but it’s fascinating. Besides dying a few times on camera, I haven’t played illness. I haven’t played blindness. I haven’t played deafness. I haven’t played any sort of serious incapacitation.
Digest: What do you think about when you look back on your DAYS experience and the fact that you’re still there?
Hall: I’m just so glad the gate opens every time. Just, “Oh, okay, my name is still on the door. The key card opens the gate. I get to come back one more day and play with these amazing people.” I so love what I get to do, and I love the people with whom I get to do it. And it’s meant so much to all of us, to my family, so there’s no greater gift. If I were looking for a family, boy, I found me a really good one.
