Days of our Lives’ Billy Flynn Opens Up About Getting Clean

Days of our Lives star Billy Flynn has returned to the show and the role of Chad better than ever — in more ways than one. The actor appeared on co-star Freddie Smith’s (Sonny) podcast that he has with his fiancée Alyssa Tabit recently and talked frankly about the recent battle he waged and won and how it’s affected his set life.

Winning — Billy Flynn Style

The actor spoke candidly about his fight to get sober and what he felt before then. “It made me feel like at peace. Especially when I found the right combination later in life, you know, with drugs and alcohol… Even on the show, for a long time, people didn’t know.”

Smith responded, “Yeah, I was going to say, like, I never… we worked together a lot. Like, I feel like I never noticed… you always had your sh*t together.”

The Big Secret

“Yeah, no, every day,” Flynn admitted. “And people looked the other way cause, you know, you’re doing good work but you know my behavior was certainly like not who I am as a person, you know what I mean? Where you start to get short [with people].”

One co-star who did notice. “Marci [Miller, who played his on-screen wife Abigail at the time] knew. There were times when she would clock me, and she’d say, ‘I see you,’ and I would be like, ‘Oh boy.’ It was bad in the end — like really, really bad.”

Sober Living

Flynn has been sober for about a year now and admits he had a problem with coping skills. “I drink to get rid of pain and to get rid of feeling — like even if it’s happiness, I’ll drink… for something bad or good but it’s always to not feel the way I’m feeling.”

The actor spoke candidly about the tie-in with shame, and how it would feed on itself — you want to do it more because now you feel bad. “Coming back to DAYS this time it was important to me… almost like a working amends [referring to the ‘making amends’ part of the 12-step program].

“You go back, and you do the things, and you show up… You don’t make a stink, and you just do your job.” Watch the interview in its entirety below.