‘Days of Our Lives’ Star Eric Martsolf Talks on His Unexpected Casting as Brady Black on ‘Soapy’

Picture this: a man pushing a double stroller through the streets of Porter Ranch, his two young kids strapped in, the California sun beating down. On the surface, it’s an ordinary afternoon — a dad out for a walk with his children. But beneath that calm exterior, his mind is racing. His heart is pounding. Because he’s staring at the house he’s supposed to be paying for, and he has absolutely no idea how he’s going to do it.

The bills are piling up. The job he thought he had? It slipped through his fingers. He didn’t get it. And now he’s out here, pushing his kids through a neighborhood he can barely afford to live in, wondering what comes next. Wondering how he’s going to look his wife in the eye when she comes home and tell her that the money isn’t coming.

That’s where we find Eric — a man at the end of his rope, clinging to hope by the thinnest thread.

And then, right in the middle of that suffocating uncertainty, his phone rings. It’s Marnie.

Her voice comes through the speaker like a fire alarm: “Eric, can you get your butt to the studio right now?”

He’s confused. Confused and exhausted. “Why? I didn’t get the job.”

And Marnie, with that no-nonsense energy that only true friends possess, fires back: “Well, maybe you got a job. They want you for Brady Black.”

The words hang in the air, and for a moment, Eric can’t process what he’s hearing. Brady Black. A character who’s been off the canvas for three years. A role that someone else has been filling, someone else has been breathing life into. And now they’re calling him. They want him to step into those shoes.

“Brady Black,” he repeats, the name tasting like possibility. Like salvation. Like a door swinging open just as he was about to give up.

But there’s a catch. A complication that would make anyone hesitate. His wife is out of town. The kids are with him. He has no one to watch them. How is he supposed to sprint to the studio for the meeting of a lifetime when he’s got two toddlers in a double stroller?

Marnie doesn’t even blink. “Bring your kids. Drop them off at my office.”

That’s Marnie. That’s the kind of person she is. Not just a manager — a lifeline. A woman who sees a man on the verge of something extraordinary and refuses to let logistics stand in the way.

So Eric does it. He loads the kids up, makes his way to Marnie’s office, drops them off with a kiss and a prayer, and races across town to meet Gary Tomlin. The walk to that meeting room must have felt like the longest of his life. Every step carrying the weight of every unpaid bill, every sleepless night, every doubt that had whispered maybe this isn’t going to work out.

And then he’s sitting across from Gary Tomlin, and the words come: “You’re Brady now. Here’s your backstory. Welcome to the show.”

Even now, years later, the memory gives him chills. That moment — that single, irreversible moment — when everything changed. When the trajectory of his entire life bent in a new direction. When the man who didn’t know how he was going to pay for his house became the man who would walk onto the set of Days of Our Lives and never look back.

But the story doesn’t end there. Because Eric still had to go back for his kids.

He knocks on Marnie’s door, a smile spreading across his face. “Marnie, there are my kids.” And there they are — chaos incarnate. One toddler banging an Apple remote against the desk like a percussionist possessed. The other happily hammering away at a keyboard, creating what sounds like a toddler symphony of destruction. Papers scattered. Cords tangled. Office supplies sacrificed to the gods of childhood curiosity.

Marnie looks at him, looks at the beautiful disaster unfolding around her, and with perfect deadpan delivery, she says: “Congratulations. Get your kids out of my office now.”

Eric laughs, scooping up his tiny tornadoes. “I’m so sorry. Love you. Just send me the bill for the damages.”

“Love you. Get out of here.”

He got out of there. He took his kids, he went home, and he waited. And when Lisa finally walked through the door, he told her the words he’d been aching to say: I’m on Days now.

They cried. They hugged. They held each other in that moment of pure, unguarded joy — the kind of joy that only comes when you’ve been through the valley and somehow, against all odds, made it