‘Days of Our Lives’: Michael Dietz on His Surprise Soap Return After 20-Year Hiatus

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Nearly 20 years after his last soap appearance, Michael Dietz will appear on Days of Our Lives beginning April 30 for a short arc as Dr. Jeffrey Russell, who is working on a miracle drug.

Dietz started his daytime career on Port Charles as Joe Scanlon in 1997 but has since moved behind the scenes as a producer of reality television, so other than a brief appearance on 9-1-1 in 2022, performing hasn’t been on his radar. As a result, the idea of stepping back in front of the camera was somewhat daunting.

“For the last, 15 years, since my soap days, I have had a recurring dream probably once every couple of months, that I’m on a set and I completely forget my line, and I’m pulling up the script, and it’s a minute before the scene, and I’m panicking,” Michael Dietz says. “So, after I said yes, I started going, ‘Oh, no. Am I going to be able to learn my lines?’ I jumped in as quickly as possible into the scripts when I got them, and it all came back, but I was still very nervous.”

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Getting a warm welcome from the cast provided reassurance, as did seeing a familiar face in the studio. “The greatest joy is I went in and, of course, everybody was beyond lovely,” Dietz reports. “And when I got on set, Scott [McKinsey], the director, came out, and he was one of my last directors I worked with on Port Charles. He gave me a big hug, and I said, ‘I’m a little nervous.’ I had my scene with Mary Beth [Evans, Kayla Johnson], and she was so lovely. After, Scott said something over the speaker on the stage, like, ‘Welcome home, pal.’ Then it all kind of melted away.”

That he’s been cast as a medical professional yet again wasn’t lost on the actor. “What is it with me and doctors?” he muses. “Ironically, my daughter’s graduating from Duke in a month, and she wants to go to UCLA for her Master’s and PhD. She wants ‘doctor’ at the end of her name, so the big joke is I’ve played one on TV, and my daughter will be one.”

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Though Dietz has appeared on multiple soaps, he admits he wasn’t as familiar with the Salem crew. “Probably a lot of [the cast] was like, ‘Oh, who’s this new guy that just got this part?’ ” he notes. “I’m like, ‘Oh, no, no, man, I used to do this back in the day.’ I feel so old now. I’m a little bit grayer now.”

But the adrenaline rush from performing quickly came back to him after his first day on set. “I called my wife [Paige Rowland, ex-Kit Montgomery, All My Children] on the way home, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God! That was so much fun,’ ” he recalls. “I totally got bit again. I mean, realistically, it had been maybe 20 years since I did scenes like that in front of the camera. I did a gig on Passions [as Jake in 2007] and Bold and the Beautiful [as Dr. Mark Maclaine from 2002-05], but to go back to that when you basically don’t do it for 20 years is a really strange experience. It was awesome, though. Everybody was just really nice and made me feel super comfortable.”

 

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Dietz’s path to producing began 25 years ago, when he started developing programs and pitching ideas to networks. “I ended up selling a scripted show to NBC that got greenlit for pilot, and we thought it was going to go to series,” he recalls. “And I was like, ‘Oh, this is so easy.’”

When that didn’t pan out as planned, a friend who was working on Big Brother urged Dietz to consider pivoting to reality TV. “Big Brother was one of my favorite shows,” Michael Dietz shares. “I watched it religiously with my wife and daughter, and he was the guy that was coming up with the games and the challenges. I was like, ‘That is the coolest job I’ve ever heard of in my life.’ And he ended up getting me an interview with Big Brother. My resumé had nothing in the unscripted world, but I went in as a fan of the show with a ton of ideas. And the guy at the time that was hiring was like, ‘Look, I have people with tons of experience on their resumés, but I love what you’ve come in with and your approach.’ A week and a half later, I got the call that I was coming on as a producer for Big Brother, and I have been working ever since.”

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Dietz has found great success behind the camera and has served as co-executive producer on a string of high-profile shows, including House of Villains, Generation Gap, and Love Island USA. He’s looking to add even more credits to his impressive list of hits. “I’m still pitching and selling a lot of my own shows,” he relays. “I’ve got seven shows in some stage of development. We have one with Reese Witherspoon‘s company [Hello Sunshine], a show that we just started taking out pitching. I have one at Fox. I have one with Sony. And then my wife, since we’ve been empty nesting for four years now, came on and the two of us have put together shows, and we’re pitching. I can’t think of how many pitches we had in the last few months between Hulu, Netflix, NBC, all the places. So that’s been really amazing for us.”

Though his plate is full on the production side, Dietz wouldn’t mind flexing his acting muscles from time to time. “I could see doing it if stuff like this came up every now and then,” he states. “Before Days, I would have said no. I felt like I had closed that chapter and moved on. But then I had that experience, and I was like, ‘Oh, there’s no reason I have to close this. This is fantastic.’ So, I would definitely have a conversation, and I am 100 percent open now to explore possibilities that come up in this space again.”

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