Rick Hearst, Young and Restless’s Former Matt Clark, Responds To Roger Howarth Recast (EXCL)
Last month, Young and Restless resurrected one of its most notorious bad guys, Matt Clark, now played by daytime vet Roger Howarth (ex-Todd, One Life to Live; ex-Franco, General Hospital et al). The character had been absent from the screens — and from the lives of his favorite targets for torture, Sharon (Sharon Case) and Nick (Joshua Morrow) — for 24 years, having taken what appeared to be his last breath in 2001. Back then, he was played by Rick Hearst, now Ric Lansing on GH, who tells Soap Opera Digest that he was just as shocked as fans were to discover that Matt was getting a new lease on life.
Life Goes On
Matt’s dramatic demise certainly did appear to be definitive, as the villain notoriously yanked out his own breathing tube and placed it in a stunned Nick’s hands to frame Nick for his “murder,” so it makes sense that Hearst did not expect Matt ever to get the “back from the dead” treatment. “We all know that dead is never dead on soaps,” the actor chuckles, “but that guy was dead! It was just short of, like, [15th-century Scottish knight] William Wallace being torn to pieces and different pieces of him being put on different spikes on London Bridge and whatnot. That’s how dead he was!”
Hearst learned that Howarth, his former GH castmate, had been hired by Y&R when the news first broke back in August, which came hot on the heels of the show’s announcement that Tamara Braun was joining the cast as Sienna Bacall. He had touched base with Braun, who he had worked with when she played Carly on GH early in his own Port Charles career, to congratulate her on her new gig (“Tamara and I are very close; we’re very good friends and keep up with one another”), but at the time, he didn’t realize that Sienna was connected to Matt Clark (she’s married to the guy, who has been going by the name Mitch Bacall). “When I first found out about Roger, I had no idea what his role was,” Hearst explains. “And then a fan sent me a video or something that had superimposed images on it. I saw Roger on one side and Sharon on the other side and it said something like, ‘Matt Clark is back!’ And I went, ‘What?!?!'”
Once the shock wore off, Hearst saw the vision. “I think it’s a brilliant choice,” he declares of the casting. “He’s a great actor. If they were going to pick anybody to play this role and be able to do something really extraordinary with it, I would say Roger would absolutely be the right person.”
Hearst speaks highly of his own experience working alongside Howarth on GH. “He’s very unpredictable, and you’ve got to stay present when you work with him,” the actor says. “That’s what makes him so fascinating to watch and to work with.”
Sharing the stage with Howarth was never more unpredictable for Hearst than when the two men appeared together in the two live episodes GH staged back in May of 2015. Over the course of those two shows, Howarth’s character, Franco, discovered that the woman he loved, Nina (then played by Michelle Stafford, Y&R’s Phyllis), was impulsively marrying Hearst’s character, Ric. “What I remember most about working with Roger,” Hearst says, “is that we were in the middle of rehearsal and I was trying to make sure that I don’t go up [actor speak for forgetting a line], because I was playing it in rehearsal as if, ‘We’re live now!’ And in the middle of running it, as we were going from set to set to set, I went up. I was just fighting to hang on to it and not break [character]. I fought my way through it, and Roger looked at me, he was smiling, and he goes, ‘You’re cute when you go up!'” Hearst laughs heartily at the memory, then adds, “Meanwhile, I had sweat running down my face! I said, ‘Oh, it’s cute to you?! I was terrified!'”
When the actual live performances took place, Hearst continues, “It was like the old stage adage, ‘Bad rehearsal, good performance,’ and I didn’t go up. But Roger did go up when we went live. He covered it beautifully, though, and he even said to me, ‘See? I went up during live!’ And I said, ‘Better you than me, my friend!'”
Conversation
All comments are subject to our Community Guidelines. Soap Opera Digest does not endorse the opinions and views shared by our readers in our comment sections. Our comments section is a place where readers can engage in healthy, productive, lively, and respectful discussions. Offensive language, hate speech, personal attacks, and/or defamatory statements are not permitted. Advertising or spam is also prohibited.