Exclusive: DAYS Fan Turned Star Julie Dove On Meeting Her Salem Idols

Jill Johnson/jpistudios.com

Getting on a show of which you've been a long-time fan has its perks. Julie Dove, who plays Connie on Days of our Lives , can attest to that, and says there were more than a few actors she was very excited to meet when she first joined DAYS .

A Salem Dream Come True

At the top of the list? "Mary Beth [Evans, Kayla] Stephen [Nichols, Steve], Deidre [Hall, Marlena], Suzanne [Rogers, Maggie] and Jackée [Harry, Paulina],” rattles off Dove. “I mean, I was excited to meet everybody, but those were the people that I was like, ‘Oh my God. I've got to make sure I introduce myself to them.’ ”

Eventually, Dove did get to meet all of them. “It took me a while to have the courage to talk to Stephen and Mary Beth,” she admits. “I had written Mary Beth a fan letter when I was a teenager, and she wrote me back. I still have the letter. I told her that story. And my sister, Rhonda, and I went to meet Stephen at a public event he was doing when I was in high school. I told Stephen that we stood in line to meet him, and we got in trouble. He was at the table and there were thousands of people there. You were just supposed to walk by and he’d sign a picture for you, but I leaned in and my sister snapped a photo of us. I told him that, and he laughed. I actually waited two weeks until I had the courage to introduce myself to Stephen.”

Although Dove never introduced herself to Deidre Hall, fate intervened to bring them together. “Deidre provided a coffee cart on the last day we were working before the holidays last December,” recounts Dove. “I passed her in the hall and was like, ‘Thank you.’ Then, later, I was talking to another actor, she came up and said, ‘I wanted to introduce myself. I'm Deidre. I see you've been around. You're doing a great job.’ I literally almost died. As soon as I got in my car, I called my sister and was like, ‘Oh, my God. Deidre Hall just [complimented] me.' I don’t even know if she really knows who I am, but the fact that she had to get that out was amazing.”

Of course, having so many actors around that you’ve loved and watched for years can be distracting, too. “One of the hardest things about being on set is that they're filming parts of multiple episodes during a day,” shares Dove. “They used to film from beginning to end of an episode, but now that's not the case. There could be scenes from five episodes happening all in one day. So I need to be learning my lines in my dressing room, but we have the monitor where everything happening on stage you can listen to. And I'm like, ‘Oh my God, I need to see what's happening with Xander and Sarah,’ because I really like them. But I’ve got to learn my lines, too.”