DAYS’S Xander

As a guest on Digest’s podcast, Dishing With Digest, Paul Telfer talked about his surprising journey to Salem’s front burner.

Soap Opera Digest: Tell us about some of your early acting jobs.

Paul Telfer: I mean, the first couple were pretty terrible. They were these very low-budget sitcoms. It was on Sky TV, which is a British satellite company, a bit like cable. It was one of their very first self-produced productions, but it was incredibly cheap and shot in Spain. I did a guest star on one of their shows that was called ... even the title’s terrible. It was called IS HARRY ON THE BOAT? Which in itself was cockney rhyming slang for a very rude sexual act.you can Google it if you have to. I was, like, a rival holiday rep who was a bad dancer. That was pretty much my character’s arc was revealing that I couldn’t dance, I guess. And, of course, there’s some shirtlessness at the end. Maybe two months after I did that, the same network hired me to do a different show. Again, just a guest star. You thought I was a pilot and then the twist was I was actually a stripper. It was the first time I had a stunt double, but the stunt double was for full-frontal nudity. My character in the show had a very specific piercing that I was not prepared to get. So yeah, they brought a very nice young man in to do that one shot for me. And hilariously, that was the first thing my now-wife ever saw me do on television, this full frontal stripper nudity and somehow she still wanted to date me and we’re still together, so I guess it worked out! Digest: Was DAYS the first soap you ever auditioned for?

Telfer: I was in L.A. doing pilot season and I had gotten really close to the job I really, really, really wanted so desperately and I didn’t get it. I was about to fly to New York to meet [wife] Carmen. My agents called up and they were like, “Hey, I know you don’t want to do a soap opera, but DAYS OF OUR LIVES are asking if you can come in and cover for a character called EJ for a week because the actor [James Scott] has a health issue. They will just pay you a bunch of money to sit and learn scripts just in case you need to run in and do them.” I was like, “Yeah, I’ll do that. Sounds great.” It was all great except for all the scripts turned up and it was, like, eight scripts. I was like, “How am I supposed to memorize all of this?” I had no idea how you could even begin to memorize that amount of material .... And then luckily, James did every episode so I didn’t get called in. At the end of it, they paid me the money, which I was amazed by .... But at the end of it, the lovely casting director, Marnie [Saitta], and I think it was [Co-executive Producer] Greg Meng sat me in their office and were like, “Hey. Would you be interested in doing the show?” And I was so cocky back then because I was getting close to all these big jobs. I was like, “Eh, I’m good. It’s not really a good fit for me and my wife’s on the East Coast and then she’s going to be on tour and I don’t know if I want to be stuck in one place for a year or years at a time.” But to their credit, they were very patient. Pretty much every year or maybe even every six months, they would send through an audition or just get my interest if I was maybe thinking about coming on the show. And then fast-forward [to playing Xander] .... I was very nervous about it because of all the material and all the memorization and all that. The thing that ended up really surprising me about it was that I actually really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the speed of it and the whole process of it. I really enjoyed the work environment. It’s a really fun place to work. I ended up kind of loving it. I was devastated when they let me go the first time ’cause I was originally on a one-year contract. I think I did maybe three or four months of it on that first run right before they brought a bunch of famous DAYS veterans back for the 50th anniversary. They changed the writing staff and a lot of changes happened. I didn’t take it personally, but it happened to me personally and it sucked. But I remember even when they let me go they were saying, “Look, this isn’t about you. It’s about what we’re trying to do for the 50th anniversary and everything. We’re not going to kill you; we’re just going to tuck you off to the side. We’d love to