When Stephen Nichols made his Days of Our Lives debut as Bo Brady’s old friend-turned-enemy, Steve Johnson was as lowdown and dirty as they come. Or at least as lowdown and dirty as the former Merchant Marine’s first employers, the very-bad, no-good Victor Kiriakis and the somehow-even-worse Harper Deveraux.
Once Steve met Kayla Brady, his innate sweetness began to reveal itself more and more — but not always in terribly practical ways. For instance, thinking that newfound sibling Jack Deveraux (then Joseph Adams) was dying — and knowing that he was smitten with his nurse — Steve sacrificed his feelings for Kayla to push them all the way down the aisle. Of course, this did nothing to diminish either Steve’s feelings for Kayla or vice-versa, and when Jack learned that they were carrying on behind his back, he raped his wife and had his brother beaten up.
After Kayla extricated herself from her disastrous marriage to Jack, she and Steve tied knot and began counting down to the birth of daughter Stephanie — only to have the groom’s “late” first wife Marina Toscano rise from the grave and throw their lives into turmoil just long enough to die again and get her successor sent up the river for murder!
In 1990, Steve had no sooner become a police officer than he was bumped off by Lawrence Alamain, who wanted to bury the do-gooder along with any incriminating knowledge he might have possessed. During the years that Patch was “deceased,” his portrayer appeared on everything from Santa Barbara (as Skyler Gates, pictured) to General Hospital (as the brooding Stefan Cassadine — opposite Kayla’s portrayer Mary Beth Evans as Katherine Bell).
As you can see, Kayla took it in the opposite of stride when, 16 years after Steve’s passing, he returned to Salem alive and… well, not well, exactly; he had amnesia. But he also had a pulse, so she had to chalk up the turn of events as a win. Plus, he, of course, regained his memories just in time to recall that the villainous Stefano DiMera had implanted in him a…
In retrospect, Steve’s homicidal brainwashing by the Phoenix almost came in handy when he learned that Andre DiMera had killed Stefano’s son, Benjy. Steve was so consumed by grief and rage that purple nurples were just the beginning of the vengeance he wrought against the murderous DiMeras.
So obsessed with Patch was long-ago lover Ava Vitali that she would stop at nothing to be with him. That, or make him sorry that he refused to be with her again. Seriously, you name it, the Mafia princess did it, from sabotaging a plane to abducting Hope Brady (thinking that she was Kayla).
In 2008, Steve and Kayla welcomed into the world son Joey. Of note: This is not a picture from his birth. (Duh.) Soon after, perhaps figuring that he had the right number of peepers for the job, Steve went into the private-eye business.
After some time away from Salem, Steve and Kayla returned… apart. Though he hoped to reunite his family, Ava had other ideas, the kind that — naturally! — involved kidnapping Kayla and strong-arming the object of her obsession into sleeping with her. Afterwards, sensing that the psycho didn’t know when to quit, Joey attempted to clue her in by smothering her to death. Or so he thought…
Following Ava’s “demise,” Steve discovered that their “late” son wasn’t deceased at all. (Is anybody in Salem ever really dead-dead?) And the more Tripp Dalton learned about Mom, the more convinced he became that it had been Kayla who’d done her in. (Guess he didn’t inherit Dad’s gift for sleuthing.)
You’d have thought that after a while, there would be nothing more that Stefano could possibly do to Steve. But ah, you would have been wrong, so wrong. In 2019, the baddie’s henchman Dr. Rolf implanted in Steve his master’s “essence,” thus allowing him and Hope, who believed herself to be Princess Gina, to run around Salem making more kinds of trouble than we even knew existed!
Though Steve was so embarrassed by his shenanigans as Stefano that he pushed away Kayla almost long enough for her to marry Justin Kiriakis, the two of them found their way back to one another as surely as Ava climbed back out of the grave into which she’d never actually been put in the first place.
Hoping to track down Kristen DiMera, who was on the run after making Sarah Horton disappear (and, for good measure, occasionally masquerading as the doctor), Steve and Kayla went undercover at a convent as Father Nichols and Sister Mary Elizabeth. What happened next, as you can well imagine, was utter “nunsense.”
After Tripp saved sweetheart Allie Horton from the devil by luring the demon into himself and then jumping out a window, his dad saved him by bellowing at the heavens, “I want my boy!” How’d that work? Apparently, he’d yelled loudly enough that the late Bo heard him and beamed down to earth just long enough to revive Tripp by acting as a kind of otherworldly EMT.
When a combo platter of the villainous Orpheus’ revenge plot and a missing magical orchid put Kayla six feet under, Steve cried a few bitter tears. Very few, since it turned out that Megan DiMera had turned his Sweetness, along with Marlena Evans and Kate Roberts, into a lab experiment from which she emerged no worse for wear.
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