NEED TO KNOW
Days of Our Lives has officially bid farewell to Drake Hogestyn.
PEOPLE previously confirmed that Hogestyn died on Sept. 28 from pancreatic cancer at age 70. Eight months later, his Days of Our Lives character, John Black, took his final bow on the June 2 episode of the soap opera he’s starred on for 38 years.
John died in the hospital in the episode, with his wife, Dr. Marlena Evans, played by Deidre Hall, beside him. He had been injured in a lab explosion days before, after he tried to help Steve (Stephen Nichols) find an experimental drug to save Bo (Peter Reckell).
“You have put up the bravest fight I have ever seen,” Marlena told her husband through tears in the scene. “I know you’re weary. I know you’re suffering. If you need to go, it’s okay.”
Hogestyn’s character was completely wrapped in gauze, covering his face entirely, given that the actor was not the one playing John for the final scene.
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She told John — whom she married three times: first in 1986, then in 1999, then again in 2006 — that he’d given her and their children “all the love we will ever, ever need” as she said goodbye.
“We will always have you in our memories. We will always hold you in our hearts,” she said. “You can rest now.”
Before he flatlined, a flashback of Marlena and John’s love story played, reminding viewers of the decades-long romance they’d watched unfold over the years.
In an Instagram post after the emotional episode aired, Hall, 77, called the episode the “hardest day ever.”
Reckell, who made a return to the show as Bo for the first time in two years for the episode, told TV Insider that there was “no acting required” for the emotional scenes about Hogestyn’s character, “because you’re saying things as the character that parallel your feelings in your personal relationship.”
He said that “all these emotions came up” during the memorial for Hogestyn’s character on the show, and he “just wanted to run away and be by myself and feel those feelings. To have to do it as a character was really difficult.”
“It’s still difficult to talk about because Drake touched everybody in his sphere so closely, and he was my brother and one of my best friends,” he told the outlet.
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John’s death scene was the result of Hogestyn’s real-life illness. He had not appeared on the show in nine months by the time executive producer Ken Corday broached the subject of ending his character’s storyline, but he made sure the actor was on board with the idea first.
“I wanted to make sure Drake signed off on this, and he was totally in favor of it,” Corday told Soap Opera Digest in November. “We were rolling the dice, because it’s difficult to tell a story of someone’s death or a character’s death while the actor is still alive — albeit [Drake] was fighting, like a tiger, a very difficult disease.”
“I made the choice to [say], ‘Okay, let’s tell the story.’ He hadn’t been on [the show] in nine months. We needed a reason [for John’s absence].”
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“He trusted me. Had Drake, God willing, beaten this, he would’ve come back, and it would’ve been something different. But [the story] had to be told,” Corday continued. “It was extremely difficult and painful for us to tell it.”
