Days of Our Lives First Look at Chad’s Return

Key Points

• Darin Brooks is returning to The Bold and the Beautiful after taking leave in the fall of 2023.
• The Emmy-winning soap star tells EW he’s ready to bring “banter” and “keep things light” on the always-explosive daytime drama.
• Brooks originated the character of Wyatt Spencer in 2013, and was last romantically linked to Katrina Bowden’s Flo Fulton.

Los Angeles hasn’t been the same without Wyatt Spencer.

After a two-and-a-half year hiatus, The Bold and the Beautifulis regaining its hilarious heartthrob, originated in 2013 by Darin Brooks. Entertainment Weekly can exclusively announce that Brooks is rejoining the cast of the CBS daytime drama, with his first episode back coinciding with his birthday on May 27.

Though Wyatt had begun slowly shrinking away from Bold heading into the fall of 2023, Brooks’ announcement that October that he planned to exit the series shocked its fans. “After 10 amazing years, it’s time for me to say ‘Until we meet again…’ to Wyatt Spencer,” he wrote on social media. But he teased what the ambiguous nature of Wyatt’s eventual departure the month after confirmed: “Doesn’t mean it’s the end, just… bye for now.”

“There’s some times where you hang on to a story, sometimes a little too long, that you feel like it was wrapped up,” Brooks tells Entertainment Weekly in the lead-up to his Bold homecoming. But then, “You always could tell a little more story.”

Brooks’ first screen role, as Max Brady on Days of Our Lives, won him rave notices with the daytime crowd, leading to an Outstanding Younger Actor in a Drama Series win at the 2009 Daytime Emmys. A two-year stint on the cult favorite collegiate football sitcom Blue Mountain State after his Days departure in 2010 set him up to spring back into the soap world with the meaty role of Wyatt on Bold.

More accolades followed, as Wyatt’s steamy Bold entrance on a 2013 episode (being spied naked in an outdoor shower by Kim Matula’s Hope Logan) announced a major new player in the soap’s setting in the cutthroat Los Angeles fashion industry. He was honored with another Emmy nod in 2021, as Wyatt navigated fractious relationships with the Spencer boys and patriarch (Don Diamont’s Bill Spencer Jr.) and dramatic entanglements with the likes of Steffy Forrester (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood) and his latest flame, Florence “Flo” Fulton (Katrina Bowden).

But Brooks says he’s excited to bring the sun back to Bold‘s perpetually stormy L.A. “I spoke to [executive producer and head writer] Brad Bell and Brad was like, ‘Yeah, let’s see if we can figure something out.’ He’s like, ‘We miss your comedy around here.'”

Brooks explains that “soaps can be very dramatic, obviously, as we know. But I’ve always found it fun, for myself, but also for the audience to keep things light, and to banter with the family, the Spencer boys and our dad.” Wyatt and brothers Liam (Scott Clifton) and Will Spencer (Crew Morrow) have been “falling back into things, having fun, and ragging on [Bill], and he rags on us. It’s like that, you know, father-son banter that I think the audience really loves and misses.”

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Wyatt left town on an ambiguous note that Brooks is excited to clarify. “They kind of just sent me off with the girlfriend and my sort of family, my other side of the family took off. But it’s always nice because in soaps, you can kind of do whatever. I know Days of Our Lives, there’s been characters killed off about 17 times and brought back to life,” he says.

When it comes to filling fans in on Wyatt’s travails during Brooks’ hiatus, the actor shares, “I’ve talked to Brad to say, ‘Hey, where do these pieces fit in? What happened to his girlfriend? Where is he coming from? What kind of state is he in?'” Brooks knows the viewers will wonder: “Is he coming back a single guy? Is he trying to figure his life out? Is he sad that he didn’t get to talk to his family for a long time? We got to hash out some of those details.”

Brooks can’t answer those questions with too much specific detail. But he can offer instead an exciting tease.

Brooks explains that Wyatt’s “dad forces him to come back to town, and then we realize why he’s here and what he has going on in relation to the girlfriend, to Flo, and to someone who is a part of his life, who also comes back with him.”

The actor breaks into a mischievous grin when he describes this mysterious accomplice as “a surprise special guest, who I think you’ll see when we air as well, on the second day. He comes back to L.A. for a reason that his dad asks, but he comes back with a surprise guest.” Just who is anyone’s guess.

The Bold and the Beautiful airs daily on CBS at 1:30 p.m. ET and 12:30 p.m. PT and streams on Paramount+.