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INTERVIEW

Heather Lindell Chats About Her DAYS Visit

Heather Lindell wrapped up her current Salem return today, and the actress reports that she was thrilled to get another run. “I did such fun stuff the last week I was there,” she enthuses. “I feel like as a soap actor, the goal is to be part of a soap wedding and mostly to be in a soap wedding, like, the bride, something I certainly never thought Jan would get to do. Even as kind of skewed and not real as it is, the fact that I got to put on a soap wedding dress and do the whole thing was epic. I loved it. I had so much fun. It’s so bucket list.”

She enjoyed working with new actors this time around. “To be in a big group wedding scene was also really fun, especially working with Deidre [Hall, Marlena] and Drake [Hogestyn, John],” she notes. “Marlena was the officiant for the wedding, so it was a lot of scenes with Deidre, which were really fun because she’s playing her therapist role where she’s just trying to placate the crazy in Jan. We have many, many scenes together. We kept taking photos together. I have so many photos of Deidre and me. I think it was fun for her, too, because we hadn’t really gotten to work together before and I think she liked seeing Jan’s crazy. So that was great. Drake was great. It was just really fun. I had a really good time.”

Lindell would be open to another visit. “I love playing this character,” she says. “Although she’s definitely had a one-track focus — and maybe she’ll continue to have that focus — I think that there are so many layers to her. There are so many ways she could be written and so many things she could do and so much trouble she could stir, whether she decides to move on and become obsessed with someone else or whether she focuses her mania on someone else, which we saw her do a lot with Claire — manipulate Claire and start to develop that friendship, which I thought was really unique and interesting that they wrote that. I would love to kind of see where these writers, if they bring her back, decide to go with her because there’s a lot you could do with the character.”

The actress reports that she did show these scenes to her sons, Desmond, 8, and Beau, 6, who were scared by her appearance in the “Last Blast Reunion” app series. “I showed them the scene with John Aniston [Victor] just because the outfit is so fun — they put me in this short, leather, sexy faux police officer look — and they really liked that scene. Jan kind of threatens him at the end and the boys loved that. They thought it was fun watching mom be bad. Not scary bad, like putting bombs in cakes, they didn’t like that one, but this was less scary.”

Since her other job is as a real estate agent, Lindell enjoys playing a character who has no boundaries. “It just makes me as a person feel so normal and like such a good person,” she muses. “Jan is pretty out of her mind, but she always strikes me as someone who is so smart and so capable of so much and she pulls off these feats where you’re like, ‘How is she doing this?’ She figures out intel, she’s always worming her way into where people don’t want her and then manipulating them so that she can stay around, which is so unlike me and so fun to play.”

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