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Deidre Hall might be most famous for her role as Dr. Marlena Evans on Days of Our Lives, but there’s a second role she’s played that can be even more fun: Hattie Adams.
Hall, 77, opened up about playing the two characters on the July 15 episode of the Soapy podcast, hosted by The Bold and the Beautiful star Rebecca Budig and Hall’s Days of Our Lives costar Greg Rikaart.
“I’ve played for Marlena for so many years, and she is, you know, just rigid, and by the numbers. Predictable in a pleasant way,” Hall said of her famed character. “But getting to play Hattie is just, oh golly, you know, spitting gum on people, spilling things on people.”
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In real life, Hall is an identical twin. Her sister Andrea joined Days as Marlena’s twin sister Samantha Evans in 1977. She was murdered off in a 1982 plotline, but almost two decades later, the show wanted to do a double plotline with Marlena again. Andrea returned to the show as Hattie Adams, a woman who resembles Marlena (but isn’t related to her) and causes serious chaos.
But Andrea (who only had a handful of non-Days acting jobs) eventually decided to retire from acting and go back to her life as a teacher, so Hall took over the role of Hattie in 2004.
Budig, 52, and Rekaart, 48, asked Hall to explain the story about “spitting gum,” who said it all comes down to a scene with Peter Reckell’s Bo Brady. Budig said she was amazed “no one broke” when Hattie spat her gum in Bo’s face and asked if they tested it in rehearsal.
“No,” Hall explained. “I said to him, ‘You know, it’s Hattie. We never know what she’s going to do.’ ” Reckell, 70, warned her, “Don’t be cute.”
“I said, ‘We just, we can’t predict her.’ [He said,] ‘Don’t do anything,’ ” she recalled. “So we rolled tape and I thought, ‘Yeah, all right.’ As we know, I spit my gum on him, and it landed on him.” She said it was a “hard moment” for everyone to stay in character and not laugh.
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Hall also shared the clip of the moment on Facebook in March. She wrote at the time, “Funny Friday!! Reckell and I STILL howl over the gum moment. Heroic that nobody broke!!”
Hall joined Days in 1976 and celebrated her 5,000th episode of the series in 2023. She told PEOPLE at the time of joining the show, “I said to my agent, ‘I want a regular job. I want a home.’ Days happened, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. It’s the family I always wanted.’ ”
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Hall also told PEOPLE that it was her idea to work with her twin sister. “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 said. Andrea ended up using the money to pay off her student loans.
“Working with her, living with her, paying off her college loan, just having that time together was spectacular,” Hall said
