Peter Bergman Recalls Taking Over Role of Y&R's Jack and Discusses Continued Commitment to Rehearsing

The actor celebrated 35 years at the soap in 2024

Author:
Daytime Confidential Staff
Publish date:
Nov 27, 2024

In 2024, Peter Bergman celebrated 35 years in the role of Jack Abbott on The Young and the Restless. He first premiered in the part on Nov. 27, 1989. Looking back on his storied tenure at the soap with Soap Opera Digest, the actor shared how he tried to make the role of Jack his own and how he still places importance on continuing to stay prepared for each scene.

Prior to Y&R, Bergman had earned fame as All My Children's Cliff Warner. And when he took over the role of Jack, he wanted to put his own stamp on the role. He mused:

The real truth is, before Cliff Warner, I was often cast as the rich-kid accomplice to the murderer, the spoiled, rich, privileged scion to some business leader. Those were the roles I was cast in a lot in theater. And so making that switch from Cliff to Jack was easier than most people would have assumed. There were parts of it, though, that were challenging because I did have a predecessor [Terry Lester]. I had a guy that was here before me who was well-established and well-liked and so I was surrounded by Jack Abbott experts left and right. Every person here knew more about Jack Abbott than I did, and they had a way they imagined Jack being that I didn’t want to play! I’ll give you an example. By the time Terry Lester left, Brad Carlton [Don Diamont] was an annoying little pool, man. 'Oh, he’s so tiresome.' And, 'Jill Abbott [Jess Walton] is a nuisance, and I’m not going to deal with her' was kind of the whole vibe, the whole energy, from Terry Lester according to everyone around me. And I just didn’t want to play that. I wanted to have Brad be just the most unctuous point of contention in my [on-screen] life, this pool man who ruined my sister’s life.

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So how did Bergman go about injecting his own creative energy into the Abbott playboy? He reminisced:

I’ll tell you a story that I told Jess Walton [Jill] 10 years after I started working with her, this story I came up with for Jack Abbott. They had told me Jack and Jill were lost on a mountaintop and ended up sleeping in front of a fire under the same blanket and things got carried away and, you know, he eventually had to face his father about sleeping with his stepmother. I told Jess that what I was playing [when Jack and Jill were in scenes together] was that it was very cold up there on that mountaintop, and Jack is very confident in who he is in the bedroom, but that was not his best night at all. And Jill knows that, and Jack knows that she knows that. So I always played there was a little of, 'I’d like just one more shot at this.' And at the same time, being embarrassed to be around her. So she wasn’t a little bother, she was an irritant! And so that’s kind of how I got started there. They fought me a little bit on it and then eventually they embraced it, because I loved working with Jess Walton and I loved working with Don Diamont [ex-Brad, now Bold and Beautiful‘s Bill].

Bergman is still delivering top-notch performances on the soap after three-and-a-half decades, and his commitment to rehearsing is as strong as ever. He shared: