Fan favorite Galen Gering, who plays Rafe on Days of our Lives, got his soap opera start on Passions, which debuted 25 years ago this month! Soap Hub chatted with the actor about the storyline that head writer/creator James E. Reilly opted not to resolve when the show went off the air in 2008.
Destiny Denied
Gering played Luis Lopez-Fitzgerald, a lawman on the NBC soap opera that began on July 5, 1999. NBC dropped the show in 2007 and the last year of the program aired on DirecTV. There were two main love stories on the show for its entire run. Theresa’s (Lindsay Hartley) pursuit of Ethan (Eric Martsolf, now, Brady, DAYS), and also the love saga that stretched across the ages between Luis and Sheridan (McKenzie Westmore).
However, while Ethan and Theresa got their happily ever after in the series finale on August 7, 2008, Luis and Sheridan were paired with others — there was no payoff for the audience that had invested nearly a decade in the duo’s relationship. How come?
“I wish [the late Jim Reilly, who died on October 8, 2008,] were around to answer that question,” Galen muses to Soap Hub. “Obviously, that would be the ultimate answer. But I do think that one of the things that [Jim] loved to do was frustrate the audience. That was one of his hallmarks and trademarks.”
This is quite true. A savvy head writer will delay gratification in order to keep his audience in suspense. “[Jim] would take about this all the time,” Gering recalls, “‘If I give them what they want, then why are they going to keep watching?’”
But still…if there was a time to give the audience happy ending, it’d be in the show’s finale. Could Reilly have been hoping for Passions revival someday so that Luis and Sheridan’s epic love tale would continue? “Yes, he probably was looking down the road at something else, maybe,” Gering says.
Fancy That!
Luis found love with Fancy (Emily Harper), but many fans feel that Passions left them hanging in the finale by not reuniting Luis and Sheridan. Still, the actor philosophizes that Luis and Sheridan were the couple to keep apart given that their love story was so tortured and faced so many obstacles during the run of the show. “If [Jim] was going to do it with one couple that was the couple to do it with,” Galen Gering says. “He’d be like, ‘I told you guys…listen. [I’ve] been doing this for almost a decade now!’”
