Days of Our Lives Exclusive: Dan Feuerriegel Zeroes In On a Surprising — and Surprisingly Perfect — Next Romance for EJ

Is there really only one true love?

Few women loom as large in the life of Days of Our Lives’ EJ as Sami. She may have blown out of town vowing never to return (and has so far kept that promise even when her own mom was on death’s door!), but out of sight has never exactly been out of mind when it comes to this volatile pairing.

So when Dan Feuerriegel chatted with Soaps.com recently, of course we had to ask him about the pairing! And yes, the actor agrees, Sami was EJ’s true love; his ultimate relationship — “according to the fans!”

It’s not that they’re wrong, he makes clear, but “I don’t have that history with Alison Sweeney, so I don’t know the intensity of the relationship.”

He gets it, but his EJ has only had on-and-off run-ins with her, and they’ve all ended fairly quickly and fairly disastrously. To be fair, that’s just about the entirety of “EJami,” but since Feuerriegel only joined Days of Our Lives after Sweeney left the show full-time, he just never got the chance to develop a long-term “EJami” run.

“A lot of my relationships,” he noted in character, “have been like, ‘Oh, I’m going to do something and then Sami comes back. And then it finishes, and then I’m going to do something and then Sami comes back.’”

It happened with Belle. It happened with Nicole. And now, Sami is nowhere in sight and EJ and Nicole have just begun circling each other once more after months of faking us out with an “Ericole” reunion that seems all but dead and buried forever now.

The surprisingly sweet reunion is completely platonic at the moment as they both deal with grief and EJ offers Nicole and Holly safe haven. But that’s kind of what makes this the perfect opportunity for them to build a real, genuine relationship — free from Sami and free from schemes to keep each other or hurt each other.

They have the basis of real caring and respect here that can be built on. And that’s exactly what Feuerriegel would love to finally see for his character.

“It would be kind of cool to have a storyline where EJ is just madly in love,” Feuerriegel muses, “fixated, and it’s separate from all the drama. It kind of grounds him. There’s no drama with it — well, there has to be drama — but he’s just madly in love.”

OK, admittedly, Nicole hasn’t exactly been a grounding force in the past with, well, just about anyone, and she and EJ have never been the most stable of couples. Blackmail, adultery, faked pregnancies, stolen children…

But Nicole’s done a lot of maturing over the years (meddling in Jada’s pregnancy aside…) and since Susan’s death, EJ’s shown a surprising tenderness to those around him. Could it be, dare we hope, growth?

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We won’t hold our breath on that, but Nicole is well aware of EJ’s flaws and aware of her own. She wouldn’t be the Sarah to his Xander, pushing him to do better. Instead, she knows who he is and what he does, and she could be someone in his life who accepts him for it!

As Feuerriegel himself admits, there has to be drama in even his dream relationship — the only soap opera pairings that are drama-free are off-screen — but that doesn’t mean they have to constantly be under threat of breaking up like, say, Nicole and Rafe were.

The two of them could be stable because they, more than a lot of characters, get each other and respect each other.

“Then all the other stuff is just there with the chaos and stuff,” Feuerriegel explains. “I would love to see what that is like.”

EJ and Nicole are both very flawed characters and they’ve both been burned by love too many times to count. Their love can be its own thing and the two, we have no doubt, will have plenty of external drama to keep things interesting outside of themselves.

Unless Sami comes back again.

Take a look at our photo gallery full of everything you need to know about Sami’s “better half.” Maybe we should soon chance that to Nicole’s “better half!”