After six months, Nicole has finally been reunited with her baby on Days of our Lives and thinks all is right with her world. Little does she know that E.J. is keeping another whopper of a secret from her -- he is not Jude's father, and Eric is.
Daniel Feuerriegel is relieved that one truth about Jude is finally out in the open. He also felt the scenes where Nicole is finally reunited with her baby had the right emotional punch for a good reason -- DAYS chose to use a real baby for the big moments. Until May, Jude was just a blanket that Eric and Sloan held. With the baby being nothing more than a prop, it was hard to form an attachment to the story, but all that recently changed.
"Because it's a real baby, all of us automatically went into this mode of, 'Oh my God. There's a tiny little human being!'" Feuerriegel told Soap Opera Digest. "It 100% added to it."
The actor also credited Arianne Zucker with knowing just what to do with their new co-stars, the twins who play Jude.
"There were two of them, and they had different personalities," he said. "One baby was quiet, didn't really do anything, just kind of chilled out and was happy. The other baby was a little bit more restless. I think you can tell when you watch it which baby is which. Ari [Zucker, Nicole] was the one that was with the baby most of the time, and she knows what she's doing. She's a phenomenal improviser. Whatever the baby did, she just interacted with the baby and was able to still do what she needed to do. I felt like I did the same. I probably didn't have as much to do with the child, where I had to hold on and do all that sort of stuff, but Ari made that look easy."
Feuerriegel may not like what E.J. did when he forced an oblivious Eric to give up his own son, but he understands his character's motivations.
"There's never been anything where I'd be like, 'Oh God, that's terrible.' I know it's all pretend," he said. "And being able to play E.J. for the amount of years that I've been able to play him, you get an idea of his mentality, which is, he will do whatever he can to win at any cost, regardless of who he runs over. It's in his DNA. He was brought up that way."
With the infamous Stefano DiMera -- arguably one of soap opera's greatest villains -- as a father, it's easy to see how E.J. would do just about anything to get what he wants.
https://www.soapoperadigest.com/content/exclusive-dayss-dan-feuerriegel-on-ejs-baby-daddy-drama/
Will Nicole forgive E.J. for hiding the truth about Jude? Or will this be the story that takes her (and the adorable real baby Jude) off canvas? We want to hear from you -- so drop your comments in the Comments section below, tweet about it on Twitter, share it on Facebook, or chat about it on our Message Boards.
