John Oliver’s soap opera dreams may be coming true.
Three months after the Last Week Tonight host used the closing minutes of his HBO show to publicly beg daytime dramas to cast him, a new report says Days of Our Lives has taken him up on the offer.
Consider the source, but according to the Daily Mail, Oliver has started taping a role on the long-running Peacock soap, with the part reportedly written specifically for him. The site describes the role as “wacky,” which—given Oliver’s stated wish list—sounds about right.
Back in March, Oliver closed a Last Week Tonight episode with an extended tribute to the anything-goes pleasures of daytime soaps, citing everything from demonic possession on Days of Our Lives to Stephen A. Smith’s recurring role on General Hospital. That last revelation seemed to genuinely haunt him.
“I am jealous,” Oliver said at the time, before making his pitch directly to the producers of The Young and the Restless, Days of Our Lives, General Hospital, and Beyond the Gates.
“I’m officially offering myself to you,” he said. “Write me a role and I’ll be on your set so fast it’ll make your head spin.”
Oliver did have some conditions. He didn’t want to play himself. He wanted the character to have a ridiculous name. And he wanted something “juicy,” preferably involving “murder or slapping or being slapped, or being someone’s long-lost something.” He also requested a dramatic close-up, because standards matter.
To prove his commitment, Oliver then staged his own soap-style audition, recreating one of Stephen A. Smith’s General Hospital scenes by confronting—and then shooting—a suspicious nurse. The segment ended with Jack McBrayer appearing as Colonel Sanders and shooting Oliver, which, as soap auditions go, is hard to top.
The Mail’s report should be treated with the appropriate soap-opera-grade pinch of salt (the headline frames his soap role as “his desperate ‘plan B'”.) But the premise is at least plausible: Oliver’s March plea was specific, enthusiastic, and practically gift-wrapped for a daytime cameo.
Assuming it pans out, Oliver won’t just have gotten the role he asked for. He’ll have joined the very tradition he was celebrating: celebrities dropping into soaps, committing fully, and trusting the genre to make sense of it later.
Stay tuned.
