Exclusive: Y&R’s Peter Bergman On Jack’s Future With Diane, Kyle
One Big Happy Family? The current dynamic between Jack (Peter Bergman), wife Diane (Susan Walters) and son Kyle (Michael Mealor) is less than ideal.
Peter Bergman, who recently celebrated his 35th anniversary in the role of Jack Abbott on Young and Restless, is delighted by the positive direction his character’s love life has taken since Jack and Susan Walters’s Diane found their way back to one another.
Highs And Lows
“It was a project!” Bergman declares of selling Jack and Diane’s romantic resurgence, noting that both he and Walters “were lit to make it work. We were both inspired to turn this into something. I think she is a wonderful actress and she brings great things to [the pairing]. I think the odds were against us and we made it work — we made it work again! I admire her work very much and I think she gave them [the show’s creative higher-ups] more than they knew they were gonna get.”
Bergman isn’t the only one who is pleased. “One of my happiest compliments that I’ve received in a while goes back to when Diane was reminiscing about our relationship and how it grew all the way to marriage,” the actor begins. “And I ran into Lauralee Bell [Christine] who said, ‘Hey, can I tell you something? I watched the show the other day and they did this montage of the entire relationship that you and Diane had, from deeply contentious and angry to the day of your wedding. And it was so lovely to see every stage of it, all the way through, because you guys made it so real.’ I like that compliment!”
Everyone in the couple’s orbit now knows that Jack and Diane’s breakup was staged. As for how their ruse has impacted the bond between and husband and wife, Bergman muses, “I have two things to say about it. One is, again, Jack is going to extremes. The whole Nikki thing was a bit extreme, and hiding from their family that they are not, in fact, fighting and all of this stuff — they went a long way to save their son. At the same time, they were playing this game of pretend, but it was all ad-libbed. And I think things were said that can’t be unsaid, in their effort to appear real to others. It put a big question mark in Diane’s mind. Jack said some things that, wow — I mean, he just went a big step too far in letting the world know that he has big questions about Diane, and I think there’s a price to pay for that.”
Bergman wouldn’t be surprised if that plays in to the spouses’ future storyline. “I wonder if that’s where we’re headed. Incidentally, I asked them not to tell me. So, we’ll see where it goes, but I think that’s an interesting little twist to the whole thing, that in their efforts to, as a team, show the world that they weren’t getting along anymore, Jack said some things that were deeply hurtful. Deeply hurtful. And he’s going to have to fix it.”
Jack and Diane’s relationship with their son, Kyle, has also seen far better days, and Kyle has voiced that he is harboring a lot of hurt — particularly over Diane’s past abandonment of him. Observes Bergman, “Jack’s relationship with his mother,” the late Dina, who abandoned Jack and his sisters when they were young, “was so formative, and such a giant part of why he was such an ass for so long, that he has an understanding of Kyle trying to find a place for his mother abandoning him. Few people know this better than Jack — but just knowing it and understanding it is not enough. Kyle is really, really questioning where they go from here — and believe me, Jack is hell-bent on fixing that.”
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