Photo: Todd Williamson/NBCUniversal via Getty
ForDeidre Hall, many days of her life have been spent filmingDays of Our Lives.
On Friday, the 75-year-old actress, who has played Dr. Marlena Evans on the soap since 1976, celebrated her 5,000th episode of the daytime soap.
“It’s a big moment for me,” Hall exclusively tells PEOPLE. “I said to my agent, ‘I want a regular job. I want a home.‘Dayshappened and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh.’ It’s the family I always wanted.”
Hall leftDaysin 1987 to pursue her roleon Our House, but returned after the NBC sitcom got canceled the next year. “My attorney was a friend of [soap star] Tom Langan’s and I said, ‘Gosh, it’d be nice to go back toDays,'” Hall confesses. “He said, ‘I’ll make a call.’ And it was done.”
Randy Shropshire/PEACOCK
“Ann Marcus, who had been interviewing a lot of the primary actors on the show, one of her questions was, ‘What’s the storyline you’d like to do that you’ve never done?’ Now, how genius is that? And I said, ‘Gosh, maybe I’d like to work with my twin sister,'” Hall recalls.
Columbia TriStar Television/ Courtesy: Everett Collection
Andrea, a special education teacher in Tallahassee at the time, flew out to L.A. and lived with her sister while she worked on the show. The actress worried about her twin’s acting chops — especially when it came to a scene that required Andrea to fake cry — but Andrea ending up impressing the star.
“I was so panicked for her,” Hall recalls. “I stood way out of her sight line and I was watching the scenes and she began to cry. As she came off, and I said, ‘That was spectacular. How did you do that?’ And she said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I’ve watched you do it for years. How hard could it be?'”
Hall says her sister eventually paid off her college loans with the money she made working onDays.“Working with her, living with her, paying off her college loan, just having that time together was spectacular,” Hall notes.
Hall will also never forget another iconic moment: when Marlena burned down a church — for a special reason.
Gary Null/©NBC/Courtesy Everett Collection
Marlena has come back from the dead countless times over the years, but “like my marriages, I have not kept track,” quips Hall, who has been married four times.
RELATED VIDEO: John Aniston,Days of Our LivesLegend andJennifer Aniston’s Father, Dead at 89
She thinks Marlena and John Black’s relationship will stay strong, though. “We’re the couple that teaches you that people stay together through thick and thin, and they stay loving, and they stay sensual and sexual, and that’s worth fighting for,” Hall says.
The mom of two appreciates how fans have always been along for the journey: “They’re able to suspend the disbelief long enough to really sink into the story.”
Mitchell Haaseth / ©NBC / courtesy Everett Collection
Hall also acknowledges how die-hard soap fans can be — “they just come and stand in my front yard,” she says — and recalls how she formed a special relationship with one devotedDaysviewer.
Hall and this fan, who was 96 years old at the time, started writing each other letters back and forth. And then, while visiting Philadelphia, Hall decided to visit him.
“I got to his house and we sat on the front porch and just talked and talked,” she says. “He was an artist that had done every known style of watercolor and charcoals and oils. We stayed in touch and we talked three or four times a month.”
The Wisconsin native planned to visit him again and checked in the day before her trip when he told her, “I’m feeling kind of funny.” The next day, Hall received word from his son that he had died.
“I have all of his letters; I’ve got a number of his charcoals and illustrations that hang in my home that are just one of my great treasures,” Hall says. “The richness of that friendship up until the day before he died, just the closest.”
Albert L. Ortega/Getty
Interactions like that make being onDays, whichmoved to Peacock from NBC last year, for a whopping 5,000 episodes feel like “more than the work” to Hall.
“It’s all a group effort,” she says. “It’s everybody pulling in the same direction at the same time. We get to be on camera, so we get a little more of that light shining on us, but everybody works just as hard and supports each other. I love the people. I love the production. I love the sense of welcome. It’s such an absolute joy. It’s been a home.”
Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE’s free daily newsletterto stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
New episodes ofDays of Our Livesare available on Peacock at 6 a.m. ET weekdays.
source: people.com
