The sweet hereafter

Despite a tumultuous year on- and off-screen, DAYS’s Suzanne Rogers is doing just fine

- Janet Di Lauro

After decades of playing a paragon of virtue and all things warm and sunny on DAYS, Suzanne Rogers was apprehensive when the show’s brass warned her that her character would be shifting over to the dark side. “I wasn’t thrilled when I was told they were going to bring the alcohol storyline back. I didn’t want to do it,” states Rogers emphatically, having already gone down that dismal route in the late ’70s.

It wasn’t Rogers’s reluctance to forsake her post as a Salem do-gooder. “No, no,” she assures. “It’s hard to play something that is not in your realm, that you don’t know a hell of a lot about. I mean, before, I went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and I sat there and I listened. It was hard. It’s squeamish. You have such empathy for the people who are alcoholics, and so you want to do them justice. But you know it’s going to take a toll on you, and that’s basically what it did. I couldn’t let it drop.”

Rogers was also concerned about being able to handle such a heavy plot now. “When you’re younger, you think you can do anything,” she notes. “When you get older, you don’t know. When you haven’t had a major meaty storyline in quite awhile you don’t know. So you go, ‘Oh, my God. Do I still have it? Can I still dig down in there and get something and make it believable and make it truthful?’ That’s kind of what was going on for me.”