DAYS: SALEM SAYS GOOD-BYE TO VICTOR

“It was awful. I can’t say it any other way,” begins Kyle Lowder (Rex) of filming Victor’s funeral, which airs this week, knowing that his portrayer, John Aniston, had also passed away.

“That man had such a presence, both physically and energetically, in that studio that you could almost literally feel the vacuum, the void that was left when he was no longer there. I didn’t like it.” 

Lowder forged a tight bond with Aniston when he played Brady in the early aughts. “He and I were very, very close during my first years there, from 2000 to 2005, when he played my grandfather,” the actor relays. “We had a lot of scenes together. He taught me so much about the craft of acting, about how to navigate the soap opera schedule, the rigors of it. I would call him a mentor along with Drake Hogestyn [John]. So, to do episodes about Victor’s death was really hard. I’m not gonna lie. When I first found he had passed last November, I obviously shed my tears, and then I thought I was stable until I showed up and I saw the funeral set and then I lost it again. I miss the man, so doing those scenes was not easy. I actually lucked out because Rex was one of the characters that did not have to go up and say words about Victor because I don’t know how I would have been able to get through that.”