Time to move on. Three weeks after announcing he was exiting Days of Our Lives, Greg Vaughn admitted he began thinking about exiting in 2017, soon after he returned following a nine-month absence.
“A lot of things that were said to me or promised to me never came to fruition,” the Queen Sugar star, 47, said in the new issue of Soap Opera Digest. “I didn’t feel like all of the things that were being told to me were being delivered. I felt like a glorified extra in everybody else’s story line, and I never felt like Ari [Zucker] and I were given a, ‘Hey, you’re going to be our couple.’ So, it was time. My deal was over and that was it.”
The actor, who has played Eric Brady on the soap since 2012, noted that the show’s producers continued asking him to stay, even on his last day.
“The shape of the show, the direction of the show was kind of a little bit everywhere,” the Daytime Emmy winner continued. “The more and more I started to pull away, the more and more I felt that I wasn’t connected anymore. I didn’t feel that they had their eye on me in any way to grow with me.”
Vaughan announced that he had wrapped on Days of Our Lives last month on the “That’s Awesome! With Steve and Bradford” podcast, hosted by his former General Hospital costars Steve Burton and Bradford Anderson.
In his Soap Opera Digest interview, he also noted that the door to return is “never closed” and leaving set in November for the last time wasn’t easy.
“I think it just made me stop and realize that I’m thankful for every day and this is a part of my journey,” the former Young and the Restless star, who got engaged to Angie Harmon in 2019, said. “I love Days of Our Lives. I’m glad to be a part of that. I will forever be connected to it, but there’s so much more of me to continue to grow. And my being a father is my No. 1 job. And now I get to be a husband again someday. These are my new priorities right now.”
