Bergman, who plays Jack Abbott on the CBS daytime drama, says the episode was “the most challenging thing” he’s done on “The Young and the Restless.”
Peter Bergman has been nominated for over 20 Daytime Emmy Awards while playing Jack Abbott on “The Young and The Restless” over the last 36 years, but the actor still feels flattered each time he hears the good news.
“It never gets old. It just doesn’t. There’s something nice about the people in my industry saying, ‘Oh yeah, he’s one of the good ones,'” he tells TODAY.com in a recent interview over the phone.
Bergman, who joined the cast of the daytime soap opera in November 1989, is one of five actors nominated in the lead performance in a daytime drama series category at the 52nd Annual Daytime Emmys, which take place Friday, Oct. 17.
The star is being honored for his performance in a “Y&R” episode from 2024 that follows Jack as he goes to extremes to pull his friend Nikki Newman (Melody Thomas Scott) out of an alcoholic relapse.
When Bergman first heard that only he and Scott would appear in the special episode, he was “dumbstruck,” especially since he didn’t have much advance notice to prepare for the emotionally intense scenes.
“I was a little thrown by it all, I definitely was. And then I read it, and it was pretty clever,” he recalls.
The episode finds Nikki, a former alcoholic, spiraling in a hotel room after a villain named Jordan forced her into a relapse by filling an IV with alcohol to make Nikki dependent on alcohol many years after she became sober.
Jack, who once struggled with an addiction to opioids, has been serving as Nikki’s sponsor. He shows up to convince her to get help, but is met with resistance.
In a last-ditch effort to rattle Nikki out of her relapse, Jack risks his own sobriety to make Nikki realize how far she has fallen. He calls his old drug dealer and gets a pill delivery. Then he ingests the pills.
It’s been a long time since Bergman has had the opportunity to tap into this side of Jack, so he had fun filming the scenes.
“Jack has kind of morphed into the head of the Abbott family and a responsible person. (I thought), ‘How many more chances am I going to get to cut loose?’” he says.
Bergman On Jack’s True Motivation for Helping Nikki
At first, Bergman didn’t think his character was going to go through with taking the pills, but after drinking with Nikki, he thinks Jack felt more uninhibited.
Aside from being Nikki’s sponsor and friend, Jack is also her former husband. Bergman thinks his character saw this as a chance to redeem himself for a tragedy that occurred during their marriage: a miscarriage she suffered after tripping down the stairs while arguing with her former love interest, Victor Newman (Eric Braeden), whom she later reconciled with and is currently married to. Afterward, Nikki turned to alcohol to cope with her pain.
“That was a marvelous story to get to play because Jack was an enabler. He was not the right thing for his wife. And it just got worse and worse and worse,” Bergman says, adding that the couple eventually “destroyed” their relationship.
Flash-forward a few years, and Bergman thinks Jack couldn’t help but recall why his former wife first became an alcoholic.
“This was Jack’s chance at redemption, to be her sponsor, to really come through for her, to help her through this in a way he could not when it was very important to him and he failed,” he says.
Bergman On the Repercussions of Jack’s Actions
Jack risked it all to help Nikki and eventually succeeded since she did get help for her addiction. However, the bold move created a lot of chaos in both Jack’s and Nikki’s lives.
“Jack paid such a price for this. His son (Kyle, played by Michael Mealor) lost respect for him. His wife (Diane, played by Susan Walters) questioned his love for her and commitment to their marriage,” Bergman says.
Jack and Victor have been “mortal enemies” for decades, Bergman says, and Victor was furious to hear that Jack put Nikki’s life in danger.
“Jack spent the night in a hotel room with a very drunken Nikki and ordered pills and got so intoxicated he completely passed out while Nikki was drunk as a skunk. Who knows what else went on in that hotel room, Victor thinks,” Berman says.
“And if he didn’t hate Jack before this, oh my God, this goes so deep. He hates him with a vengeance that is almost immeasurable because of this. So that this 40-year-old rivalry suddenly is not just renewed, it is enhanced by this story, this one show,” he continues.
Although Jack’s actions were extreme, Bergman says his character truly believed the end justified the means.
“I don’t think Jack has the regrets everyone would like him to have because indeed it was successful in jolting her into sobriety,” he says.
Bergman On Preparing for the Emotional Episode
Bergman personally connected with the story on a deeper level since he lost a close friend to alcohol addiction nine years ago.
“It was a giant loss for me, so the subject was a very personal one,” he explains. “I always wondered, ‘Could I have helped him? Could I have done more to help him?’ And Jack was not going to have that feeling. ‘Could I have done more to help Nikki?’ There is no limit to what Jack was going to do to help Nikki.”
Production on the set of a soap opera typically moves at lightning speed, meaning stars don’t often get a lot of time to plan their scenes together. However, Bergman and Scott made it a point to run through the dialogue to get a better grasp of the emotional subject matter.
Filming was broken up into two days, and each day, Bergman had to switch gears to film other episodes.
“That’s as much as my memory has been stretched in daytime,” he says.
Looking back on the special episode, Bergman can’t help but applaud his “amazing” co-star for her “brave, bold, drunken performance.”
“Playing drunk is a hard thing, and she was just brilliant,” he says.
Bergman On His Emmy Nomination
Bergman was thrilled when he heard he had received a Daytime Emmy nomination, but it was also a bittersweet moment.
“I was disappointed that Melody didn’t get a nomination because she had probably a harder job in that show,” he says.
Bergman was initially hesitant to submit a tape of this particular episode for consideration for a nomination since there’s a limit on how long the tape can be.
“You don’t get to show them that much variety in showing one scene from a show. Yes, it’s a long scene, but it’s one scene from a show,” he explains.
Bergman was also concerned about how the audience would view the scene without the context of the rest of the episode.
“Does the audience know this is not normal behavior for Jack? Does the audience stick around long enough while we kind of set it up that he’s trying to help her? Are they going to watch the entire thing and see just how far Jack was willing to go?” he says.
In the end, Bergman says he listened to “wiser people” who encouraged him to submit the scene since it was “unlike anything anyone’s going to submit.”
Looking back on the episode, Bergman says it was “the most challenging thing” he’s done on “Y&R.”
“It was really up to me to set the pace of every scene, so that was kind of a new challenge and a challenge I liked,” he says.
