On Days of our Lives, characters change all the time, but not everyone survives the shift. Robert Scott Wilson opened up about his former character, Ben Weston, and didn’t just talk about the work. He walked through the moments where things could have gone wrong, but chose to push harder instead. What he said about taking a risk and figuring it out mid-fall makes it pretty clear why he’s still here.
What Robert Scott Wilson learned on Days of our Lives when things got risky
During an interview with on Soapy, hosted by The Bold and the Beautiful’s Rebecca Budig (Taylor) and his DAYS co-star, Greg Rikaart (Leo), Wilson didn’t pretend the early Salem days came easy, especially as his first character, Ben Weston, became something else entirely.
Wilson made it clear that the shift from Ben into the Necktie Killer storyline wasn’t something he coasted through. “I was like, ‘If this door is shutting in my face, I at least have to make sure that they remember who they shut it on,’” he said. This realization helped him cement how he played Ben.
“I don’t care about trying to be just the romantic lead or just the villain. I want to be interesting.” That’s the throughline. Not safe or likable, but interesting. The rest of it was built from there.
Why leaning into the mess ended up working in his favor
What could have been a dead end turned into the thing that reshaped his run, with DAYS choosing to turn the character of Ben around. Instead of playing the fallout, Wilson dug into it, pulling from character trauma and grounding it in something that felt human enough to hold. It wasn’t about softening Ben. It was about making him make sense.
That approach didn’t just carry the storyline; it extended it. The material got bigger, the reactions got louder, and suddenly the character wasn’t done. He wasn’t even close. What looked like an exit point became the start of something longer because it resonated with viewers.
Wilson’s risk wasn’t theoretical. He took a character that could have burned out fast, leaned into the worst version of him, and found a way through it. Not by playing it safe, but by committing to the part that could have sunk him. But he managed to change things. “It took off from that storyline,” he stated, adding, “So what was seemingly the close ended up being [part of] Days of our Lives history.”
Days of our Lives is available on the Peacock streaming app.
Edited by Hope Campbell