Soap Hub Performer Of The Week For DAYS: Lucas Adams

For the majority of his tenure at DAYS, Lucas Adams played a well-meaning, even-keeled chump — Tripp Johnson’s attempt to ruin the reputation of, and then murder his mentor-cum-stepmother Kayla Brady Johnson and that time he went a little strangle happy while under Lucifer’s thrall notwithstanding — but recent events provided the talented actor a springboard for some juicy out of character moments.

Lucas Adams — Performer of the Week

Usually, the kind who wouldn’t say boo to a ghost, let alone draw attention to himself when entering a room, Tripp threw convention out the window when he swaggered — and yes, Adams out and out swaggered — into Saint Luke’s, introduced himself to the uninitiated, and labeled EJ DiMera (Dan Feuerriegel), “the son of a bitch who killed my mom.”

But it wasn’t just the mournful EJ that Tripp came prepared to excoriate. When Nicole Walker Hernandez (Arianne Zucker) stepped up and attempted to referee the two, Tripp warned that the last person he wanted to hear from was, “the tramp who slept with my mom’s boyfriend behind her back!” — and boy did Adams emphasize the word “tramp” and use it like a knife.

In an attempt to defend his…friend’s(?) honor, EJ insisted that Tripp leave Nicole out of it and that if he wanted to, “be angry with someone,” to be mad at him — which was perfectly all right with Tripp. “Oh, I’m angry with you all right,” Lucas spat, getting right up in his co-star’s face before clarifying, at full volume, “I’M FREAKING ENRAGED!” And he wasn’t in the least bit finished.

Not only did Tripp want to ensure that EJ knew he sees him for the “selfish sadistic bastard,” that he truly is, but he also wanted to ensure that the assemblage knew that it was EJ who escalated the war between him and Ava Vitali (Tamara Braun) by kidnapping him. Shock, gasp, mummer, mummer.

But after entering the scene so full of sound and fury, Lucas Adams had two final emotions to act on: shock and awe. Shock at his supposedly dead mother’s sudden appearance and awe at…well, his supposedly dead mother’s sudden appearance. All in all, it was a tour de force worthy of much kudos.

Honorable Mentions: Stacy Haiduk

Though Lucas Adams was the star of the show, as it were, Haiduk no doubt elicited more than a few laughs when she, in the guise of Sister Mary Moria, looked Tripp up and down and — expecting to see Johnny whom she just met for the first time in ages moments before — declared, “He looks different.”