Days: Deidre Hall's Top 8 Moments

[dragonflies]

http://insidetv.ew.c...es-deidre-hall/

1. Episode 4688, Tom arranges a shotgun wedding for Marlena and Eugene (Airdate: April 13, 1984): “It’s chock full of such wonderful dynamics,” Hall recalls to EW. “Roman is meant to be underground. Everyone thought he was dead but he’s underground. Everyone was so animated and incredulous. It played like slapstick, too. It felt like we were in a different genre, like a sitcom. And what was funny was that Eugene didn’t mind marrying Marlena so much.”

2. Ep. 6858, Stella spikes Marlena’s drink at Wings (Sept. 18, 1992): “We don’t get to play a lot of those scenes, when we get to cut loose and do comedy. We have so much fun. We talked a lot about how the audience will love this. Those moments we created weren’t in the script.”

3. Ep. 6954, John and Marlena finally make love — on a plane (Feb. 4, 1993): “We shot that all in one day. Once again, it was about listening to your audience and knowing how badly they wanted that scene to happen. We did this scene several times and after the last time we thought, gosh we nailed it. Then the producer came onto the floor and said, ‘quick [messing] around with this. I want to see abandon out there!’ Drake [Hogestyn] and I looked at each other. We hadn’t played like that before. We feel so safe with one another. So we did it one more time. I couldn’t stop crying when the scene was over. It felt like a completely different dance. There was no technique to it.”

4. Ep. 7515, a possessed Marlena seduces John (April 26, 1995): “It was a blatant seduction. We felt it from the audience — do it! Don’t do it! Don’t kiss her! They want each other so bad but she’s the devil! In playing the scene, I got to be suggestive and seductive and inappropriate in a lovely, innocent way.”

5. Ep. 9791, Hattie Adams (Hall) returns to Salem for two episodes (Feb. 24, 2004): ”I see a through-line with my scenes. They were such alive moments! I had so dang much fun doing that. What you don’t get to see in some of those scenes are the moments that are not on camera. I spit gum and it hit Peter [Reckell] on the face. I was doing whatever crazy stuff I could think of. I said ‘Peter, I may spit on you,’ and he replied, ‘I don’t think so.’ When the moment came, I spit a wad on his face and it stuck to his forehead. I thought we would both wet our pants.”

6. Ep. 10606, John and Marlena on the beach (July 4, 2007). “I just looked good in it.”

7. Ep. 10678, John dies with Marlena, family and friends present (Oct. 17, 2007): “I was kind of alone out there in this scene. Usually Drake and I can play off of each other — he’ll lovingly pet my face. But he couldn’t do anything. That scene was so quiet, you can feel other people’s heartbeats in the room. It’s a real ensemble performance. I believe in letting go of people who need to leave. The audience feels Marlena releasing him. It was an extraordinary act of love, letting him go with peace and dignity and tenderness.”

8. Ep. 11002, John and Marlena wed before leaving for Switzerland (Jan. 23, 2009): ”We had been let go, and it was quite a shock to us. There was a sudden need to wrap up our characters and get them out of there. We were gonna walk off the set and never come back. That’s how it went for us. John was paralyzed. He couldn’t hold me, he couldn’t stand up. This was not what the audience would have written. It was just like the airplane scene. We did it our way. Bless his heart, Drake, all he could do was speak and tear up.”

[Gray Bunny]

Those are mostly great choices (I'm sure her recollections vs. the viewers' recollections are quite different, of course). I don't have a clue what the 2007 beach scene was about. I'm surprsied she didn't select more choices from the 80's, nor any from the 70's, like moments with Wayne Northrop or her twin sister, etc.

[DRW50]

I wonder if they asked her to just pick more recent moments. I wish she'd chosen earlier material, as from what I've seen the Don Craig years were the peak of her character.

[reallyhateskateonlost]

Marlena being possessed was the best ever.

[Sindacco]

Her moaning while giving John a massage.

[Gray Bunny]

Still don't remember. Only beach scenes I recall are them on a REAL beach in 1999 for their Hawaiian honeymoon.

[DRW50]

2007 must be some kind of nadir for Marlena and John, aside from the death scenes. When I used to read Serial Drama they would rip the [!@#$%^&*] out of their characters and the moaning and groaning at that time.

[teplin]

I missed that pea soup-vomiting scene during the original storyline. Thank goodness. Some of the effects during that period were surprisingly good for a soap -- like the morphing from Marlena into Kristen -- but that vomit-and-fly clip was more the level of a Sid and Mary Kroft Saturday morning kids' show.

I much preferred Marlena with Don and then Roman to anything with John -- although I did really like the "dream goodbye" scene between John and Marlena after Marlena supposedly died at the hands of Orpheus. I've never been able to find that on YouTube.

[Gray Bunny]

The pea soup vomiting scene was from 2004 when they were trying to decipher a medical reason why Marlena would be killing half the town. Everything during that era was cheeseball special effects. The original possession story was told on a completely serious level.

[Gino24]

Here's the dream goodbye scene between RoJohn and Marlena,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcs5pQCAQbU

[teplin]

Thank you, Gino24!

[Mitch]

She forgot Marlena falling off the balcony, in her jammies no less, and bouncing off an awning and falling on a screaming Sami. We were treated to a super imposed image of DH screaming as she falls while another actor narrates "Oh Marlena is going to hit the ground , no no, she hit the awning, she bounced off, she is hitting Sami.."

[Cat]

That was classic scene! And arguably the last truly significant high Days had.

Reading this list is like an inventory of my Days-watching childhood. The Plane was an amazingly powerful love scene, as was The Conference Table and Hotsprings. I remember blushing when I watched those (and hoping my mom didn't overhear the moaning and mewling coming from the TV). John & Marlena are considered out-of-date and laughable today but, my god, the 90s was their decade. They were scorching, and their scenes were beautifully written. We don't have any of this romance and passion on soaps anymore (I guess producers would consider it cheesy or corny?) but I truly believe that the death of the truly romantic and popular Supercouple = the death of Daytime.