Young and Restless’s Eileen Davidson, Ashley, on Her Emmy Nomination: ‘It Takes A Village’ (EXCL)
The last time that Eileen Davidson (Ashley, Young and Restless) was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award was back in 2018, when she took home the trophy for Outstanding Lead Actress. But when the soap’s publicist, Matt Kane, reached out to let her know that she was nominated again in 2025, she was taken by surprise. “I was in my office, writing,” she tells Soap Opera Digest. “My phone rang in my bedroom because it was charging, and I heard Matt. I think I knew nominations were coming out that week sometime, but I wasn’t really sure what was going on with it. So it wasn’t like I was waiting for the call. I was in the weeds, writing, so it was a nice break.”
Group Effort
Ashley’s struggle with dissociative identity disorder gave her portrayer a lot of dramatic material to choose from when assembling her Emmy reel, but it proved difficult to narrow it down. “I felt like I was supposed to go with that stuff that was kind of more colorful, and there was a lot of it,” Davidson explains. “I had one week where I had literally 80 pages of dialogue, and I know there was some good stuff in there, but I couldn’t remember what, exactly. So it was a community effort with Matt and a couple other people at work trying to help me remember scenes I’d done. I asked Beth Maitland [Traci]. I kind of went back and forth with putting some more of the big personalities in there, and then I just kind of stayed very simple with it.”
While there were the scenes on the special set featuring all of Ashley’s alternate personalities talking to each other, Davidson worried those could feel confusing out of context and opted to take another approach, submitting some family moments and only including one of Ashley’s alters. “Really just a couple scenes with Beth and Peter [Bergman, Jack] and I think Jason [Thompson, Billy], where she’s feeling like her family’s doubting her sanity and it’s breaking her heart,” the actress says of what made the final cut. “And then when she realizes she’s having a break, and she’s just with Jack, and then in the middle of that, it was a scene with Trevor [St. John, ex-Tucker] where she’s Ms. Abbott, I think.
“They were all just kind of more contained,” she adds. “It just felt more honest at the time when I chose. I asked my son, [Jesse], and my husband, [Vincent Van Patten, ex-Christian, Y&R], and they were like, they liked the stuff that was just kind of more simple. So they were very helpful, actually, as was my niece. So yeah, it took a village.”
Of course, Davidson allows that this was kind of a special case, and it doesn’t usually take this much help to put together an Emmy reel of clips. “It doesn’t always because it’s pretty clear-cut what you should do,” she shares. “Even though I didn’t work tons that year, when I was working, I was working a lot, and [there] was a lot of material, a lot of characters. So this year, I think, was really kind of special because of that. It doesn’t usually take that long, because you kind of pretty much know. I had a lot of different stuff, and people had a lot of different opinions as to what I should put in there.”
Missing In Action
Y&R has quite a few actors up for Daytime Emmy Awards this year — in fact, Davidson is joined in the Lead Actress category by co-stars Sharon Case (Sharon), Melissa Claire Egan (Chelsea), and Michelle Stafford (Phyllis). “I’m always excited to see people from Y&R nominated, for sure,” she says. “So that’s just kind of a no-brainer. I really was hoping Melody [Thomas Scott, Nikki] would get nominated. Frankly, I thought she did some terrific work this year.
“Everybody who’s nominated deserves a nomination, hands down,” the actress adds. “But the one person I would have thought should have definitely was Mel.”
Odd Couple
The nominee is going to have a slightly unusual guest accompanying her to the Daytime Emmy ceremony on October 17. “My therapist is coming,” Davidson shares with a laugh. “It’s so weird! She kept telling me, ‘Oh my God, you’re gonna get nominated.’ So when I got nominated, she’s like, ‘I told you! I’m coming!’ I’m like, ‘Why? It’s really super-expensive. Are you sure you want to do this?’ ‘I’m coming. Who do I make the check out to?’ So I just think it’s very funny that she’s coming.
“So anyway, the funny thing is, my husband and I — Vinnie, it’s his birthday — so we’re actually taking Barbara, my therapist, with us,” she continues. “I don’t know why this cracks me up. I hope we don’t get in a fight, because that’d be embarrassing, with our therapist in the back seat. That’s going to be very bizarre, but she’s excited. She’s coming to the after-party, too. So, very unusual. What can I tell you?”
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.