Bryan Dattilo News

A pair of Days of Our Lives hunks celebrate birthdays today.

We'd like to wish a happy 46th to Kevin Spirtas (pictured, Jonas Chamberlain) and a happy 37th to Bryan Dattilo (Lucas Roberts).

Bryan Dattilo has a long, eclectic history of television roles. He's appeared on In the Heat of the Night and Saved by the Bell.

Now, of course, the actor is best known for his work on Days of Our Lives. With that in mind, here are a few facts you may not have been aware of about the star:

• He accompanied Alison Sweeney to her real-life prom.

• His middle name is Ronald, in honor his late grandfather.

• He studied psychology at Santa Monica Junior College.

• Older sister Kristin Dattilo is also an actress whose credits include Intolerable Cruelty.

• His mother, Peggy, was a reporter for the National Enquirer in Florida; then became a writer/producer in California.

Bryan Dattilo loves his job.

But if he's being honest, the soap opera star is a tad envious of Jennifer Love Hewitt. Specifically, her starring role on the hit television series Ghost Whisperer.

"It's my dream to be on or star in a ghost-based show," Dattilo said to Soap Opera Digest. "The paranormal and supernatural have always intrigued me. I've had so many experiences to prove that there is life after death. I'd love to do a reality haunting show where I go through old buildings and try to connect with the spirits. They do that a lot on Ghost Whisperer."

Dattilo's interest in the paranormal goes back to his childhood.

"I grew up in haunted houses. Every house we lived in was haunted and had spiritual activity in it," said the Days of Our Lives star, noting that his mother, Peggy, embraced it. "My mom used to have seances, past-life regression sessions and hypnosis sessions with her psychic friends. So that's always been around me. To see my mom's astral-projections flying around the house was normal. To see things flying off the wall was normal. To see objects coming off desks, floating in the air and dropping. So was feeling cold spots throughout the house."

So... would Dattilo set foot inside that most famous of haunted houses, The Amityville Horror?

"Yes, I would. I'm not really scared of any of that, now," he said. "I used to be petrified of it when I was growing up. To me, it's just people who have passed on. The more fear you give a spirit, the more you enable it to manifest and come through. They feed off the energy you're giving off. If you try to connect as a person to another person who's passed on, the fear element goes out the window."

As crazy as it may sound to some, Bryan firmly believes there's a message behind spirits attempting to contact people on earth, "whether they're trying to latch onto a physical place, whether they're trying to tell you something, whether they're trying to just be heard, whether they're trying to progress their soul, move on and enter the Light," he added.

Dattilo has vivid childhood memories of his mother's keys going missing and her dealing with it without blinking an eye.

"My mom would announce to the room, ‘I am in a rush. I have no time for this spiritual activity. Can you please just give me my keys back?'" he said. "Then she'd go look in the kitchen and the keys would be sitting on the counter, where she'd already looked for them 500 times."