GALEN GERING ON DAYS RETURN

Rafe is back in Salem, which marks the return of his portrayer, Galen Gering. The actor, who last filmed in February after an 11-year run, says he was happy to get the call to reprise the role.

“So the day I left was my birthday — February 13th — and I had very mixed feelings about the whole thing,” Gering recalls. “I was excited for what the future would hold without DAYS OF OUR LIVES in it, and bittersweet in that I was obviously leaving behind a lot of people I care for, and the whole experience. My overwhelming feeling was that I wanted to go with a real feeling of excitement about the unknown, and that’s how I’ve led my whole life, so why stop now? I don’t know what the future’s going to hold, what life has in store, and I’ve been very fortunate in the past, so that was really the spirit that I carried. It was definitely funny being that it was my birthday; I actually saw that as a big gift, and everyone at work was so lovely and excited for me and happy. It was cool. There was just a lot of love there.”

After leaving the soap, Gering put his focus on moving forward. “There wasn’t this crazy, radical, massive adjustment,” he shrugs. “There were a couple of other projects that I got involved in and we were doing preproduction on, and friends of mine were like, ‘I can put you in this movie,’ and, ‘There’s this other movie,’ and there were a couple of projects that came about, so I was excited about other things that were brewing.”