Austin Peck Talks To Us About Being Mr. Mom, What He Wanted To Be When He Grew Up, And More! (Exclusive!) Learn More Here >>>
By Angela Ryan-Duncan
Austin Peck played Austin Reed on Days of Our Lives and the first installment of Days of Our Lives: Beyond Salem. We recently got to sit down with him for a lovely chat and he caught us up on everything he's doing now. Keep reading to find out what he told us!
He shared with us that even though he grew up in Hollywood with an actress mother (Clare Peck) and had been doing small bits of acting from the age of 6, the entertainment industry wasn't his plan! "My mom
was an actress and my father was in the military. I was not
a good student. And I didn't really fit in the structure of school, but I liked
the idea of being in the military, and its structure, these are things you got to do, and you do
them. And it seemed to make sense to me at the time."
His father was in the Navy and Austin wanted to follow in his footsteps, "That's
kind of what I knew. I had, in my young teenage brain, my own kind of grandiose thoughts and I wanted to
become a pilot. I don't know what would have happened and
the irony is it skipped a generation because now my son is in the Air Force
ROTC, second year in college, and he's at boot camp right now in Montgomery,
Alabama. So he's really following in the footsteps of my dad."
Despite his childhood plans, he told us, "Providence had other plans. Literally, I was gonna go in the military. And then I got approached on the
streets by a talent agency called Coast
to Coast, which is still around today. And that's how my career just began."
He started off modeling and actually had an audition that could have changed things for soap fans! "I had a
screen test for All My Children. I actually screen-tested with Kelly Ripa. It began it was over and the
only thing I remember was a couch on the set. Talk about a deer in headlights! And I remember Kelly Ripa being
tiny and I remember her commenting on my hair and that's it. Judy Wilson was a casting director, and she was so kind and
loving. She actually called me in the next week when I already knew I didn't get
it. But she called me and she encouraged me to continue. And then it was like
six months or something later that I got the audition for Days." And the rest was soap opera history.
Between 1995 and 2017, Pek starred on Days of Our Lives as Austin Reed as well as doing stints on As the World Turns and One Life to Live. He had many prime-time roles as well and returned to the fictitious Salem in 2021 for the first installment of Days of Our Lives: Beyond Salem.
He moved to the east coast with his family and caught us up on what's been keeping him busy there, "I'm
really just focusing on my kids. My boys
are older and my daughters are nine and six. We're just
focusing on actually just homeschooling. So that takes up a lot of time. There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about one
of my favorite movies, Mr. Mom with Michael Keaton. That's my life. So I'm doing
that, which is really an incredible blessing because I get to spend a
lot of time raising my girls, having a close connection with
them."
Austin shared that he is keeping busy with his own interests as well, "I'm writing and I do a lot of art. Everything from
painting to cartooning. I'm collaborating on some artistic projects and I'm collaborating with people on writing right
now. But, like everything every art endeavor,
it's always a crapshoot."
He told us he remains close to his TV mom, "I
especially talk to Lauren Koslow (Kate Roberts) because she's one of my favorite people in the world.
She's great. She's just amazing. She's ageless and she's super funky and cool and incredibly smart and an
absolute joy to work with. When I get to work with her. I haven't worked with her in so long but I talk to her on a monthly basis."
We asked him if we would ever see him back on Days of Our Lives and he kept our hopes alive, saying, "Yeah. Who knows? No one ever really dies in Salem."
Truer words were never spoken! We had a great time catching up with Austin Peck and hope you enjoyed it right along with us!
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