90210 alum AnnaLynne McCord will trade Beverly Hills for Salem when she joins Days of Our Lives next year.
McCord, 36, has signed a one-year contract to play a new character named Marin, Deadline reported on Monday, December 18. According to the outlet, Marin will be a “fascinating and complicated woman who is devastatingly beautiful, almost angelic in her outward appearance” who is “the desire of many but her heart belongs to only one man who continues to push her away for her own good.”
Marin will be introduced on the long-running soap opera in 2024. Days, which moved from NBC to streaming platform Peacock last year, is currently in season 59 and has been renewed for season 60.
After spending five seasons as Naomi Clark on the CW’s 90210 from 2008 to 2013, McCord moved on to Dallas, The Night Shift and Power Book III: Raising Kanan. She starred in several films as well, including this year’s Condition of Return, which premiered on Vudu in September.
The star exclusively told Us Weekly about the psychological thriller, in which she played a churchgoing woman who carries out a mass shooting after making a deal with the devil.
McCord had to look past forming her own opinions about the character. “To play a villain, you cannot judge your character,” she told Us. “Playing villains my entire career, I’ve learned one thing: They don’t exist. People do good things and bad things, and sometimes those bad things are horrible.”
The actress — who has been open about her struggles with mental health and dissociative identity disorder and surviving sexual abuse — said that she has finally figured out how to separate herself from her character at the end of the day.
“Something really incredible has happened with my work as a result of all of the treatment I’ve been through and the healing modalities I’ve tried,” she shared. “And it’s that Eve is very much her own person — [I] leave [her] at the door and go home.”
More importantly, she’s figured out how to be happy. “I just want anyone who’s been on the journey, or any journey [like] what I’ve been through, to know that they can get through. You can find the light. It’s possible because I just did,” McCord told Us. “I wouldn’t have believed this. Me talking to me 10 years ago, I would’ve been like, ‘Honey, you don’t even know me. How do you think that you could ever turn this turmoil and torture, self-torture into joy?’ And I would just like to grab her pretty little face and be like, ‘Just watch me, honey. I’m about to do it.'”
