The Young and the Restless Exclusive: Susan Walters Dishes Diane, Jack & Patty Drama
When Jack (Peter Bergman) was abducted on Young and Restless, Diane was desperate to locate her missing husband and bring him home safely. Knowing Victor (Eric Braeden) had orchestrated the kidnapping was bad enough, but then to find out that Patty (Stacy Haiduk) was involved, Diane feared the worst. Still, she was certainly not expecting to see what she saw in the March 16 episode when she walked in on Jack and Patty in bed together! Diane’s portrayer, Susan Walters, spoke with Soap Opera Digest about her excitement at the dramatic twist — and to warn fans that Jack and Diane’s marriage may never recover from this Patty-induced drama.
Headed for a Fall
Walters returned to Y&R as Diane in 2022, and she and Jack and Diane remarried in July 2023. It’s been (mostly) smooth sailing ever since, which Walters thinks was necessary to get the audience on board with their relationship, given Diane’s long history of troublemaking. “The perception [among fans] was, ‘Who is Diane? Is she for real?'” she points out. The drama that’s currently unfolding with Patty “couldn’t have happened then,” in her opinion, because it’s “taken the viewers a while to accept — and some of them probably never will — that Diane’s for real and how much she loves Jack,” she says. “We needed time for that. Jack and Diane seem to have a normal relationship — as normal as can be [on a soap] — where they argue and they agree, and at the end of the day, really like each other as well as are in love and respect each other, and I think that all needed to come about before something like this could happen.”
Happy marriages are typically viewed as the kiss of death on soaps, where happy can often equal boring, but Walters assumed that Y&R would drop the other shoe on the Abbotts eventually. “All last year, when Jack and Diane were happy, I wasn’t like, ‘Oh no, we’re happy on a soap, that’s bad,’” she muses. “Because I just figured it was strengthening the relationship, and the fall would be even bigger when something like [Patty] happened.”
The actress notes that Diane never quite forgiving or forgetting that Jack risked his own sobriety to help get his ex-wife Nikki (Melody Thomas Scott) back on the wagon in May 2024 gave her a way in to understanding Diane’s explosive reaction to the sight of Jack in bed with another woman. “I love that they kept the little hints of what happened with Nikki and Jack alive, that that still gets to Diane,” she says. “Because then it helps set this up a little better. Like, Jack with Patty wasn’t just out of the blue — ‘He would never, because he’s got perfect boundaries with women!’ Because he’s clearly demonstrated that he doesn’t!”
The Other Woman
When the time came to drive a wedge between Jack and Diane, Walters shares that she was thrilled to discover that the show decided to bring back Haiduk as Patty to do it. “I thought that out of some of the other women in Jack’s past, she was a perfect choice,” she says. “She was the perfect person to be the catalyst for the problems between Jack and Diane and to pull off this kidnapping of him because her character is a little dangerous, and Stacy’s very sexy, and her character was written a little crazy. So it all made the storyline make sense.”
Jack, Diane and Patty have been messy parts of one another’s lives dating back to the early 1980s, when Jack slept with Diane on the very day he married Patty, and continued to carry on an affair with her behind his unsuspecting wife’s back. All three roles were played by other actors in those days: Jack by Terry Lester, Diane by Alex Donnelley, and Patty by Lilibet Stern. “Stacy and I were talking about this in the makeup room,” Walters relates with a chuckle, “because I saw a picture online of a different Patty with a different Jack, with a different Diane. But it’s great that they have that history. It gives [Stacy’s] character more license to be doing what she’s doing; Diane caused pain in Patty’s life, so it kind of gives Patty’s character license to get back to her. And it also gives Diane more fear that Jack could have been really enjoying the whole situation and that it might not end!”
And while Walters only briefly overlapped with Haiduk in Genoa City in the past — she popped back in as Diane for a few scenes in 2010, while Patty was posing as Emily — they do have a real-life connection dating back decades. “My husband,” Y&R alum Linden Ashby (ex-Cameron) did a movie with Stacy Haiduk,” Walters marvels, referring to the 1997 thriller The Beneficiary. “Which is ironic! And we all went out to dinner 30 years ago.”
Forgive and Forget?
It’s safe to say that there will be no friendly dinner dates in 2026 between Diane, Jack and Patty, though Walters is hoping for meaty material with her on-screen nemesis as the story unfolds. “I have tremendous respect for Stacy as an actress,” she explains, “but when I was read the scenes [of Diane walking in on Jack and Patty], I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I get to work with Stacy.’ I was just so focused on what Diane was walking on in: ‘My husband is in bed with another woman!’ That’s the last thing she expected to see.”
For Diane, the sight was especially brutal because of the emotional whiplash that came from from fearing for her kidnapped husband’s safety to finding him in a compromising situation with his former wife. “It could have been anyone, but it was even worse that it was Patty,” Walters declares. “There was an element of shock that it was Patty. But in terms of being a wife walking in on your husband in bed with someone else when you thought they might have been kidnapped and in harm’s way, me, Susan, tried to keep bringing it back to, as a wife would to, ‘Why would you be in bed with anyone who’s not me?’ It’s really painful. You’re shocked and you’re angry and you’re embarrassed because you’re with your son and your brother-in-law [and in light of Jack’s disappearance] she had ever reason to be worried and scared. He’s out on a boat, it’s not in Jack’s nature… The fear and the dread was so amplified, and then to walk in on that [was] doubly shocking.”
The flurry of emotions the scenario sparked in Diane had her lashing out and slapping Jack across the face. “I read one time that women mostly fight with their words,” Walters says. “So when they have nothing else they can say, when it’s such a big feeling they can’t say anything, that’s when they hit. I’m not saying that’s the way you should do it, but I’m just saying at that moment, there was so much of that anger and hurt and humiliation and all of it, and then you sprinkle the fact that it’s Patty on top… [I thought] it was awesome that they had Diane slap him, because there was nothing she could say in that moment.”
In the immediate aftermath, Walters previews that Diane is “devastated. She is shocked and angry and mortified and hurt. And her heart is broken. She feels like the relationship is over and that leads her to make a bold move.”
But the actress still has hope that Jack and Diane’s marriage can one day be repaired, especially given the history of the two characters. “No matter what Jack had done that’s iffy, Diane’s always done the worse things,” Walters points out with a laugh. “In the back of Diane’s mind, she knows that she still has more negative marks on the chart than Jack does. So Diane has to wrestle with that in terms of wondering if she can forgive Jack.”
As for Patty, Walters teases that fans can expect some fiery scenes between the two women in the future. “Diane is very aware of how dangerous Patty is,” the actress allows, “[but] my money is on Diane!”
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.