Here We Go Again

John and Marlena take another stab at saying “I do” on DAYS.

- Stephanie Sloane

“Oh, my God, I’ve been waiting for this!” exclaims Head Writer Ron Carlivati of John and Marlena’s nuptials, which finally take place this week. “When I came to the show, I was surprised to find out that John and Marlena were not married because I think of them as the rock of the show. But the couple was engaged. Of course you think, ‘Oh, they should get married,’ but then we had Chad and Abigail’s wedding, and Sonny and Paul’s wedding, and Hope and Rafe got engaged! There just didn’t seem to be a place, and you want to give it its due, so I didn’t want John and Marlena’s wedding to get lost in the shuffle of all these other weddings. By the time the dust kind of settled and no one else was getting married, we started to plan for it. Even then, we ended up taking our time because you want to make an event; you don’t want to just throw it on the screen. We’ve been building to it for a while.”

Choosing this week for them to wed wasn’t a coincidence. “Once we started to meet to set the date, we were looking at their various weddings and discovered that the anniversary of their first wedding was August 22, 1986,” Carlivati shares. “I thought, ‘Let’s go for that, because it would be romantic for them to get married on the anniversary and we’ll just take our time building up to it.’ And it’s interesting to note that John was actually Roman when they got married. We manage to address that and actually have a little fun with that as we get closer to the wedding.”

As the bridal festivities begin, Marlena receives a gift in the mail from an anonymous sender who turns out to be Susan. “It’s a very iconic thing that the audience will know well; it’s a pretty funny gift,” teases the scribe. “It seems while very DAYS OF OUR LIVES, also kind of very Susan.”