Peter Porte on DAYS' Dimitri: "He is Still a Broken Person"
Peter Porte recently made his Days of Our Lives debut. The daytime alum, who earned plaudits while Ricky on The Young and the Restless, first played baddie Dimitri von Leuschner on Days of Our Lives: Beyond Salem. Now, he's bringing Dimitri to Salem, and Porte opened up about the move to the mothership show to Soap Opera Digest.
RELATED: Beyond Salem's Peter Porte Brings Villain Dimitri von Leuschner to Days of Our Lives
On Beyond Salem, Porte was playing a character we thought was ISA Agent Kyle Graham before his true identity was revealed. So he had to delve deeper into Dimitri himself before filming some of his DAYS scenes. Porte said:
Without giving away too much, I will say this: I was walking into this clueless because there’s a hard pivot and we introduced who this character really is for three pages of dialogue. So it was a blank slate besides ‘Eastern European bad guy’. We started filming and things move very quickly, so there’s not a lot of time to sit down and really muse over which way to go with the character with the executive producer and the writers because everyone has 100 things going on and you’re kind of left to your own devices to slowly build.
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He added:
And that’s the fun thing about being on every day, that you really have the time to develop a character before the audience’s eyes. I don’t know where the story is going, so it’s a surprise to us every week, and I’m like, ‘Oh, wow, okay.’ You can’t really have hard and fast ways of deciding how to play a character because they’re going to turn it on its head next week. So it’s about being flexible. It’s about receiving the material that you get and making a bold choice. The fun thing that I’ve experienced over this is taking this really aggressive, broken, hardened character and he now is very expressive as to what he is feeling. He is still a broken person, but he has a very good heart and he’s just learning how to use it.
Porte recently worked with Lauren Koslow (Kate), acting in scenes where Dimitri held her character captive. Porte shared:
She’s gorgeous and she’s such a pro. She’s been on the show forever. She was a wonderful dinner companion on a ship.
