Exclusive: Kristian Alfonso (Hope) Shares Memories Of Her DAYS Dad, Bill Hayes
Kristian Alfonso is back on Days of Our Lives as Hope mourns the passing of her beloved father, Doug Williams, which was scripted following the real-life death of her beloved co-star, Bill Hayes.
Father Figure
Alfonso’s earliest memories of Hayes and his wife, Susan Seaforth Hayes (Julie), stretch back well before she was cast to play Hayes’s daughter in 1983. Recalls the actress, “When I was at the tender age of 14, my mom and I had taken the train in to New York from Massachusetts to meet with Wilhemina,” the legendary modeling agent, “who had seen me in a competition [Alfonso was a medal-winning competitive figure skater prior to launching her acting career] and asked me to join her agency. When we got off at Grand Central and I got off the train and I was in the main terminal, I looked up and saw Susan and Bill on [the cover of] Time magazine. And I just remember going, ‘Wow, look at that.’ It really made me gasp. And I watched Days of Our Lives, too; I would come home from school and watch it as I was getting ready to go skate and was changing [clothes] or whatever.”
The actress would, of course, go on to have a long professional and personal relationship with both Hayeses. “Meeting them in person, I was just silent,” she recalls. “And I’m usually not silent! But I was taken aback by her beauty and his handsomeness and their love. They were so inviting and so comfortable and they touched me deeply, him and her. They were so in love with each other.”
The gentle nature Hayes displayed with his wife also manifested itself with Alfonso, making a critical positive impact on her as she adjusted to life at DAYS. “I had so many touching scenes with him, and he had the same warmth that my dad did,” she smiles. “And that, for me, was incredibly comforting. I felt like I was working with someone who loved me, and of course, our love for each other grew over the years. I just always loved working with him, and to witness Bill and Susan’s love. It reminded me very much of the kind of love my parents shared.”
What most stands out to Alfonso about her on-screen dad was “the warmth, the welcoming, just always feeling very safe. He was always, always so committed to whatever we were doing, no matter how small, how simple, how difficult, how complicated, how emotional or how full of laughter. Even if we were off camera! And let’s face it: in this business, there’s not a lot of, ‘How are you?’ A lot of times, everybody’s rushing, everybody’s thinking about the next thing, and you’re not enjoying the moment. I can say that with Bill, we really had those moments to have conversations.”
The actress doesn’t take for granted what a blessing it was for her to have Hayes in her orbit from such a young age. “From the day Bill met me to our very last scene, he never made me feel like, ‘Oh, who is this kid playing my daughter? She doesn’t have a lot of experience.’ From the very beginning, he never made me feel like, ‘This girl from Massachusetts, the ice skater, the model, whatever — when is she going to learn to act?’ He never made me feel that I was ever less than. He always made me feel secure. He always made me feel like an equal. And he was just so supportive, always.”
Acting opposite him was “warm and comforting,” Alfonso says “I would search in his eyes, you know? I’d look at him before our scenes and he sometimes would have his hands in front of him and he would smile at me. [Her voice breaks] I can see him smiling at me like, ‘You’ve got this, kid.’ ”
That memory stirred up Alfonso’s thoughts of another recently passed co-star, Drake Hogestyn, who played John Black. “I just want to bring Drake up for a minute,” she says. “My heart hurts just even mentioning his name as well; my emotions are rising. But that is something that Drake would always do. And that was one of my last text messages to him [while the actor was battling pancreatic cancer]: ‘You got this. Like you used to tell me.’ Because always, if I was going up on dialogue or I was having difficulty with a scene, he’d say, ‘You got this, kid.’ And Bill and I shared that as well.”
She holds dear her many memories of the scenes she shared with Hayes. Among the stand-outs? “All the scenes when Hope was a teenager, a troubled teenager coming back from boarding school in Boston — they changed [where Hope was receiving her education] because of my Boston accent. And I have to say, the scenes that destroyed me was when they were killing off a lot of characters [during the Salem Stalker storyline in 2004] and Doug was one of those characters It just destroyed me because it just felt too real.”
As she reflects on their decades of friendship, Alfonso says, “I’m smiling. I always smile when I think of Billy.”
Conversation
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