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Kirsten Storms Reflects on ‘Days of Our Lives’ & Drake Hogestyn’s Death: ‘I Feel Like It’s Not Real’

Originally posted on TV Insider | Last updated May 19, 2025 4:59 PM ET

When Kirsten Storms joined Days of Our Lives as Belle Black in 1999, it marked a big shift in the landscape of the soap.

As the daughter of one of the show’s most popular supercouples of all time, John Black (Drake Hogestyn) and Marlena Evans (Deidre Hall), Belle and her pals, Shawn Brady (Jason Cook), Philip Kiriakis (Jay Kenneth Johnson), Mimi Lockhart (Farah Fath) and Chloe Lane (Nadia Bjorlin), represented the next generation of Salem and were introduced at a time when teen-centric shows like Beverly Hills, 90210 and Dawson’s Creek were already popular with young audiences.

For Storms, who had been performing in front of the camera for most of her life and had just filmed the now-beloved Disney film, Zenon: Girl of the 21^st Century, joining the soap marked a significant pivot from her earlier roles. “That was a reality check for how hard actors work,” she recalls of her early days on the show. “I had come from doing single camera projects and the Disney stuff and was l thrown into 10, 20, scenes a day, really thick script per day situation, working with people who have been doing it for years and years.”

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Toiling alongside veteran performers like Hall and Hogestyn may have been an intimidating prospect, but it pushed Storms to challenge herself. “Deidre Hall would not take any excuses, and I loved that,” she relays. “I wanted to show her I was capable of [doing the work]. It was one of the best learning experiences I could have had at 14.”

Her relationship with Hogestyn eventually extended beyond the set, and she got to know him on a more personal level. “I dated Drake’s son, Ben [Hogestyn, ex-Lucas Jones, General Hospital; ex-Harry Jackson, The Bold and the Beautiful] for a couple of years, and I got to spend a lot of time with Drake and his family,” Storms shares.

Hogestyn’s untimely death on September 28, 2024, a day shy of his 71^st birthday, still feels surreal to Storms. “I think because I hadn’t seen him in a while, I feel like it’s not real that he’s gone,” she says. “He just was my favorite person there and a legend. So happy and always in a good mood. And prepared. He did his 100 percent best job always. I was really upset when I heard he had passed. But again, I don’t feel like that’s even set in for me, really.”

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Though Storms is set to mark 20 years as General Hospital‘s Maxie Jones on May 23, she still holds a deep affection for her first soap role. “When I left Days [in 2004], I had a lot of sad feelings about it, just because I had grown a family there,” she reflects. “That was the longest time I had spent on a project, and everyone there was always so nice to me.”

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This article first appeared on TV Insider and was syndicated with permission.

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