The Unscripted Days Of Our Lives Scene That Peter Reckell & Deidre Hall Still 'Howl Over'

Iconic "Days of Our Lives" character Hattie Adams, played by series veteran Deidre Hall, was known to be rather unpredictable at times. Of course, she's also beloved for playing another character on the long-running show, with Deidre Hall's tenure as Marlena Evans spanning more than 5,000 episodes — an impressive feat, even by soap opera standards. However, playing the more chaotic Hattie evidently gave Hall the opportunity to cut loose a bit more, and even to occasionally go off-script. One of the most memorable instances of this came at the expense of her similarly prolific co-star, and the results were so hilarious that the two actors still can't help but laugh about it all these years later.

Peter Reckell's decades-long career playing Bo Brady on "Days" ensured fans were also enamored with him. During an appearance on the "Soapy" podcast, in July 2025, Hall discussed filming the scene where Hattie spits her chewing gum at Bo and it sticks to his forehead, with his attempt to intercept it with his hand proving futile. As Hall recalled, Reckell had no idea what she was going to do — though he definitely had the sense that something that wasn't in the script was about to happen. "I said to him, 'You know, it's Hattie. We never know what she's going to do.' [Reckell replied,] 'Don't be cute.' I said, 'We just, we can't predict her.' [He said,] 'Don't do anything.' So we rolled tape and I thought, 'Yeah, all right.' As we know, I spit my gum on him," Hall shared.

Impressively, both she and Reckell were able to finish the scene without bursting into laughter, but they definitely did after the fact. "Reckell and I STILL howl over the gum moment. Heroic that nobody broke!!" she wrote in a March 2025 Facebook post.

Another interesting tidbit about the character of Hattie Adams is that Deidre Hall was not the first actor to play her. Of course, recasts aren't exactly rare in the soap opera world. That being said, this is a unique case because Hattie Adams was actually played by Deidre's twin sister Andrea Hall before Deidre herself took over the role. "The character of Hattie began because it was somebody who — in the right light, with the right moment — looked something like Marlena [Evans]," Deidre explained on "Soapy" in July 2025. "And so, 'Who do we get? [...] Oh, wait, we have somebody who looks something like her in the right light.'" The prolific actor went on to praise her sister's "hilarious" and "passionate" performance as Hattie.

However, she also loved getting to play the complex character herself, since it allowed Deidre to bring an entirely different energy to set than the one she usually brought as the strait-laced Marlena. As she fondly reminisced, "I played Marlena for so many years, and she is [...] just rigid and by the numbers and predictable — in a pleasant way, but still. And so, getting to play Hattie was just [...] spitting gum on people and spilling things on people." Still, during an interview with Entertainment Tonight, in November 2024, Deidre called sharing the screen with Andrea — who had never acted before and was previously working as a teacher — one of her favorite things she got to do on "Days of Our Lives." "Not just because it was wonderful and the fans went mad for it, but because she got to pay off her college loan," she quipped.