DAYS Star Wally Kurth Shares A Secret About ‘Memorizing’ His Lines

Soap actors are required to memorize lots of dialogue each week, and when Days of our Lives star Wally Kurth was asked about his memorization skills at a daytime event this past weekend, he recounted a humorous story.

Wally Kurth on Justin Kiriakis

And while Kurth has been memorizing lines for decades, both as Justin Kiriakis on DAYS and Ned Quartermaine on General Hospital, there was one time when he had to turn to drastic measures. He shared the story at an event and it was captured by Twitter user, @SuperKelli24, which you can see below.

“I had to defend Hope when she killed Stefano—I was trying to mitigate her sentence, and it was a two…three-day long thing,” the actor explained about Justin’s story.

When the director came up to him to talk about the script, Kurth learned just how much talking goes into a murder defense.

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“He told me, ‘I can’t decide if the writers hate you or really love you, but you’re going to need a teleprompter, there’s no way,’” Kurth shared. But the actor would have none of it and told them to give him a shot and let him see if he could do it.

“I looked at it and I looked at it, and there was no song long enough—even the soliloquy from Carousel (which he started singing!),” Kurth said. And about two days before the shoot, he said, “get me the teleprompter.”

The fact was, the scene was shooting on Wednesday, and rather than spend the weekend memorizing the lines as he knew he should have been doing, Kurth was taking part in a tennis fundraiser for the Special Olympics and his team ended up winning. So, he realized that he wasn’t going to have the time to memorize the entire scene.

Coincidentally, on the day of the scene, the guy who was running the teleprompter, Tony, was Kurth’s old friend from UCLA who just happened to audition for Justin all those years ago, and he was quick to remind Kurth of that.

Tony taught Kurth how to best utilize the teleprompter, placing it in front of where the judge was seating, so it would look natural when Justin was giving his speech. When Tony also tried to show him how to read the lines, Kurth laughed and noted he had the acting part down.

“When I watched it, it looked really good and looked like I knew all my lines, but I was like Marlon Brando looking at a monitor,” Kurth said.

Days of our Lives (DOOL) airs weekdays on NBC. Check your local listings for airtimes. For more about what’s coming up in Salem, check out all the latest that’s been posted on DAYS spoilers, and for an in-depth look at the show’s history, click here.