Why ‘Days of our Lives’ Fired This Emmy-Nominated Star Only to Rehire Her 10 Days Later

Days of our Lives’ Emily O’Brien has quite a wild ride with the 60-year-old NBC/Peacock soap, playing two different characters with no relation to one another whatsoever. However, that second character came as quite a shock to the Daytime Emmy-nominated actress, who thought her time at DAYS was up more than three years ago.

Emily O’Brien Place in Salem

O’Brien had already spent five years on The Young and the Restless as Jana Hawkes from 2006 to 2011, per IMDb, when she was hired in 2020 to play the newly-created character of Gwen Rizczech, the retconned daughter of Jack Deveraux (Matthew Ashford) and an unknown woman he had a one-night stand with decades prior. Gwen could scheme with the best of them, but also had a vulnerability beneath the surface.

After she learned she had been used by her new husband, Dimitri von Leuchner (Peter Porte), to get his hands on his inheritance while he had an affair with her bestie, Leo, Gwen swindled Dimitri out of his money and skipped town. O’Brien taped those last scenes thinking she’d never hear from DAYS again, but then something unexpected happened. The show wanted her back, but not as Gwen.

As O’Brien explained on the podcast Soapy, hosted by her former Y&R love interest Greg Rikaart, who also plays her BFF Leo on DAYS, and soap vet Rebecca Budig (Taylor, The Bold and the Beautiful), the call came out of the blue 10 days after she wrapped her first run as Gwen.

“That was really unexpected,” she said. “I had been let go as Gwen and then 10 days later I got the call asking me to play Theresa and I had to put this blonde wig on and it was really quick.”

As DAYS fans know, Theresa is a legacy character born to Shane Donovan (Charles Shaughnessy) and Kimberly Brady (Patsy Pease) in the early 1990s. Since 2014, she had been played off and on as an adult by Jen Lilley, who hadn’t wanted to return to the show for an extended stay, so O’Brien was offered the role. To this day, the actress is still shocked that she ever brought Theresa to life.

“I don’t think in the real world that if I ever auditioned for Theresa that I would get it,” she said.

O’Brien played Theresa for nine months before departing DAYS again. Last fall, she returned as Gwen and has been going strong ever since. Is Theresa in the future cards for DAYS and O’Brien? We’ll just have to wait and see.