Jackée Harry Admits She Thought She Was Being Fired From DAYS!

When Paulina was diagnosed with thyroid cancer on DAYS OF OUR LIVES and later learned that she was also likely to need a heart transplant, fans feared it could be the end of the character. And portrayer Jackée Harry initially believed the same!

“I thought I was being fired!” the actress admitted to Soap Opera Digest with a laugh. “But there’s dead on soap operas and then there’s dead dead. I figured [my character] wouldn’t be dead dead.” (And of course, as DAYS fans know, even dead dead isn’t really dead in Salem!)

When Harry first learned of this storyline she immediately went upstairs to find out what the plan really was. “I asked, ‘What the heck is going on?’” she related. “But it was during the strike, so I kind of knew it was something they had written for that period of time. I wasn’t too frightened. But I definitely asked. That’s the first thing I said. And I was immediately [reassured].”

In the end, the actress was pleased to have brought real-life health issues to the screen with this storyline. “Well, there is heart disease, especially in a lot of African-American families,” Harry explained. “It’s genetics. I can trace it all the way back to my family and my grandmother who lived to be 106. She had a condition, but it wasn’t heart disease so much. She had what they call a heart murmur, which is controllable. But anything dealing with the heart, I try to be serious about. I know these are real situations that people have.”