LEARNING EXPERIENCE

HOW BILLY FLYNN CHANGED FOR THE BETTER IN BETWEEN DAYS\ STINTS

- Janet Di Lauro

Looking back at being written off of DAYS in 2018, when Chad and Abigail remarried and were sent off to Paris, Billy Flynn now realizes it was a blessing. “It was a nice, needed break for my sanity, and emotionally and all that,” he reflects. “In a sense, I’d lived more as Chad DiMera than I had as me for four years. I came into the show and was kind of thrust into this main storyline and was shooting so much material. I think I was shooting 190 episodes a year. That took a bit of a toll. I just stopped taking care of myself.

“I don’t cope with things well,” Flynn continues. “I think I was really stressed out and I was kind of living in a lot of fear. I was worried, ‘Are they going to write me off? What’s going to happen? Is my work good? I didn’t get that take right. What do the fans think about the character and the story?’ This was my first job. I didn’t have a lot of experience with that kind of stuff and it really took its toll on me, mentally.”

On top of acclimating to the daytime world, Flynn’s personal life was undergoing major changes. “I lost somebody really close to me, my great-grandmother, two weeks before my wedding,” he confides. “And I just never really got a chance to grieve. I was dealing with things in a lot of unhealthy ways. I was drinking too much and that was affecting my work.... I was dealing with depression. I was coping with things [in ways] that weren’t healthy for me and it was taking a toll on my life.”