Greg Rikaart didn’t expect to make it this far as a soap actor.
Rikkart tells PEOPLE that in 2003, he was a young actor in Los Angeles looking for work. “I definitely think I had some momentum, or at least something that felt like momentum,” the 48-year-old actor explains. He got “really close” to booking some big jobs and was screen testing for pilots. Even though he didn’t book them, he got far enough in the process that it felt like a good sign.
Then he auditioned for the role of Kevin on The Young and the Restless. “That was not a contract role,” he said. He had auditioned for bigger roles on soap, but says, “I think I fell just outside of the archetype of what they looked for. And Kevin, particularly when he started, was a little more on the nerdier side and not necessarily a young leading man.
“Where I got lucky with Kevin was that the role was originally supposed to be for a 10 or 20-episode arc,” he says. Since the summer months in L.A. were “pretty quiet” with work, he thought the small part would tide him over. “It felt like a win-win to just go and do a month or two on a soap,” he said.
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But it didn’t last just one or two months. “Once I got there, it didn’t matter what anybody else had said,” he says of joining Y&R despite prejudice against soap opera. “I had drank the Kool-Aid and was just happy to have a job.”
Rikaart ended up becoming a series regular on Y&R and starred on the show until 2017. Since then, he’s appeared on the soap on a recurring basis. The actor says he knew fans were invested in his character when he went to a fan convention about a month after he started, when Kevin was “in the throes” of being a real villain who terrorized Christel Khalil’s Lily Winters and Lyndsy Fonseca’s Colleen Carlton.
“It wasn’t that the reaction was like, ‘Oh, we hate Kevin so much,’ ” Rikaart remembers. “It’s like, ‘Oh, we love how much we hate him.’ And it was exactly what you want. As long as they have a strong opinion about you, that’s the win.”
But Rikaart’s job security really came when, “by dumb luck,” head writer Jack Smith noticed how much he resembled Christian LeBlanc, who played Michael Baldwin, a lawyer with his own checkered past. He made them half-brothers. LeBlanc “realized we were being given a gift,” Rikaart says, “because having family on a soap is really a gift that keeps on giving. The opportunity for stories just kind of exponentially increases.”
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Rikaart says he didn’t realize what a core part of the character it would become, but LeBlanc, 67, helped him invest in the fictional brotherhood. “Christian was so influential in making sure that we really put in the work and we would go out to dinner and we would spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the dynamic was between these two guys,” he says.
In 2005, Rikaart won a Daytime Emmy for his role as Kevin. He was nominated four more times. Since 2018, Rikaart has played Leo Stark on Days of Our Lives, which has garnered him two more Daytime Emmy nominations. With The Bold and the Beautiful star Rebecca Budig, he hosts CBS’s Soapy podcast, where they interview other soap stars about their careers and the beloved genre.
Rikaart says that working on soaps, “We all tend to be team players. There isn’t a whole lot of room for ego.” He says that throughout the 22 years he’s been working in soaps, “It’s felt like these shows are barely hanging on.” Everyone on set feels like “worker bees” who come together to make the magic happen.
He likes that about the genre. “I think in a lot of ways it feels like I have the best of both worlds,” he says. “I’ve never really been spoiled, but I also have gotten to be a working actor for over two decades.”
