Days of Our Lives Exclusive: Thaao Penghlis Tells All About the Castmates Whose ‘Sabotage’ Got Him Fired — Repeatedly!

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Let’s just say that sitting down with Days of Our Lives star Thaao Penghlis is never boring. He’s not only a great actor, but he’s also a masterful storyteller who has curated a cookbook about meals shared with his Hollywood friends. His tasty recipes and juicy anecdotes are all brought together in one delicious place: Seducing Celebrities One Meal at a Time.

It was hard to decide where to begin our exclusive interview because Penghlis knows how to spin the most captivating yarns, so we dug in with his recollections of working with former Days of Our Lives headwriter, the late James E. Reilly. It’s not an understatement to say that the men butted heads more than once in their careers. “Well, James Reilly was not a very nice guy,” recalls Penghlis. “He liked me a lot for the first year. And then there was a bit of a sabotage that went on [behind the scenes] because I was popular on the show… there was another actor and an actress who wanted to see me go.” While Penghlis didn’t reveal who those castmates were, he defended himself when the reported gossip got back to the producers.

More: Is Thaao really done with Days for good?

Word, he explains, “got back to James Reilly that I said his dialogue and his stories were crap. That’s not what I do. So, when I got called up to the producers, they said, ‘Oh my God, what did you say? James Reilly called up screaming that he’s going to kill you off and that you said that his scripts were crap.’” 

Penghlis swears he “never said a word” about the scribe’s scripts, but that’s when he learned he was about to be let go. He got a bit of a reprieve because both of his parents “died between four days of each other,” prompting the show to wait “for a couple of months because they didn’t want to look like they were bad or insensitive.” Reilly even gave him Penghlis courtesy of an extended run when he had “a lot of costs” associated with his parents’ passing. 

More: Who is leaving Days of Our Lives?

It’s clear Penghlis has mixed feelings about Reilly, due in part to the fact that when first they met, the men had “a great time” together. He adds, “We had a lot of jokes and all that, so that took me by surprise. When he was fired, I was called back.” This ping-pong pattern happened more than once. “He killed me three times. Every time he came back, he’d kill me,” the actor notes. The lightbulb went off when he realized that Reilly was killing him “viciously” each time.

“It was never, you know, I go upstairs and disappear, or I died from an overdose,” he says. “No, the lion, the tiger attacked me. I fell on the spike of a thing. I thought, ‘Oh, wait a minute. The spike going through my heart. That’s what happened to Dracula. Is that how he saw me?’” It’s a daytime mystery we will never have the answer to.