Paul Telfer is opening up about his Days of Our Lives character.
The 44-year-old actor, who plays Alexandros “Xander” Kiriakis in the soap opera, spoke about playing the villainous role in an interview with People.
“Just out of a sense of sheer fun, it is tremendously enjoyable to play a straight-up villain, and especially if you’re not particularly villainous in your real life,” he said with a laugh.
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“I try to be a goody two shoes in my real life. And so it’s incredibly cathartic to let rip and be horrible in the safe confines of a fictional story.”
“He was never an anti-hero,” he explained of the character’s full story.
“He was always just a horrible person that was allowed to show a little bit of a vulnerability and a little bit of insecurity that I think made him a slightly more endearing than the typical outright villain. And then over the years, it’s almost, instead of turning him into an anti-hero, he became like an anti-villain.”
“Instead of being a dark hero, he was more of a light villain who would attempt to do good things for bad reasons and bad things for good reasons,” he continued.
He went on to say Xander’s villainous nature is “shifting once again to actually become a true anti-hero,” which is something he’s “always hoped” the character would do.
“It’s one of these things of getting the opportunity to play a character for this amount of time and the constantly shifting canvas that we get to play these characters upon is really satisfying because we all grow and change in real life.”
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