JPI
Apparently nothing says “I love you” better than stopping your husband from committing cold-blooded murder, because in the wake of Sarah preventing Xander from shooting Brady, the Days of our Lives couple remain surprisingly happy together.
Through Sickness And In Health
“I will say they stay pretty solid through this,” says Paul Telfer (Xander), who’s quite pleased with the turn. “The fact that Sarah finds a way to thwart Xander, but also wants to stay with him… This isn't a deal-breaker. This isn’t like, ‘By the way, I stopped you from going to prison and I saved Brady's life, but we're getting a divorce because you're a psycho.’ Sarah's like, ‘No. I understand why he's being the way he is, I love him the way he is, and I need him the way he is, but I can't let him do this.’ ”
Sarah ID-ing Brady as her hit-and-run driver — all so Jada would arrest him and Xander couldn’t kill him — is an intriguing twist in the pair’s relationship. “What's kind of exciting for Xander is to see this little bit of darkness in Sarah, when she admits to him that she lied about remembering,” notes Telfer. “It's not really a big lie, because everybody thinks Brady did it. Even Brady thinks he did it. So for Sarah to just confirm it feels like a white lie, but it's still pretty big for her to do. The only really big lies we've seen from Sarah relate to children, in the past with Rachel and then keeping Victoria from Xander. Really that’s the only nefarious thing she's done.”
That is, until now. “Xander almost feels a kind of simpatico with Sarah in that they've progressed a little bit in terms of her accepting who he actually is, rather than trying to punish him or fix him,” observes Telfer. “She's accepted that this is an occasionally homicidal man that she’s in love with, and she just has to manage the situation.”
Hence, an occasional lie may be what’s necessary every now and then. “In a weird way, in an almost perverse way, it's almost like Xander perceives that as a strengthening of their bond,” explains Telfer. “I know Sarah doesn’t. Sarah's just trying to survive the next hour, the next day, the next whatever without anybody getting killed. But for Xander, it's like, ‘Oh, okay. She also has a capacity to conveniently lie' — not just for her own gain, but for his in a way. So it's almost an expression of love for him. That’s the way he takes it. Even though Sarah felt cornered into [lying] because of Xander’s actions, it’s still in this kind of twisted way pretty cool to him that she did. He feels badly that he's put her in this situation, but at the same time, he's glad that she didn't take it as yet another excuse to escape their relationship.”
After all, that’s been the couple’s MO over the years. They’ve continually made up only to break up whenever Xander goes off the rails and does something heinous. Telfer professes that he’s quite happy not to see them going that road again. “Absolutely,” he acknowledges. “I love working with Linsey [Godfrey, Sarah]. I also really love the Xander/Sarah relationship as it stands now. This latest iteration of it, after the whole big lie of Sarah hiding Xander's paternity of Victoria for all that time, allowed them to restart from a place of honesty for the first time. Since they'd gotten together, there had always been some lie or some crack in the foundation. That's not the case this time. They've both grown a bit, and their love is a bit more realistic now. You can really see the things they've been through and what they get from being with each other. It's not just that Xander idolizes Sarah and aspires to be the kind of person that she would love. It's more that he's become more of his own man and she still loves him, and that's a huge reward. Xander doesn't have to strive to be somebody else. He can be who he is, and Sarah will still love him."
This kind of progression keeps things feeling fresh for Telfer and his leading lady, he says. "If we were just doing the same beats over and over again, I think it would drive both Linsey and me crazy. I like the way they've shifted it over the years, and we joke about it all the time. The main issue is that I just want Linsey on the show. She doesn't have to be acting with me all the time, and Sarah and Xander don't have to be together all the time. But in my opinion it makes sense if we are, because our scenes are great, we have really good chemistry and we get along great. And we tape [our scenes] fast, so we’re good value.”
On-set efficiency aside, the twosome have emerged as one of the show’s most popular couples, albeit an accidental one that just took off after they were randomly tossed into bed together. “I don't think there was any plan for Xander and Sarah,” marvels Telfer. “I wasn't even on contract back then. I was just a recurring villain. So I'm just very lucky that they saw something there and decided to see if it could work.”
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