Young and Restless’s Peter Bergman on His 25th Daytime Emmy Nom: ‘It Still Feels Fantastic’ (Exclusive)
Over his 46 years in daytime, Peter Bergman has racked up an impressive 25 Daytime Emmy Award nominations, earning his first back in 1983 when he was playing Cliff Warner on All My Children. He has taken home the Outstanding Lead Actor trophy three times for his performances as Jack Abbott on Young and Restless, in 1991, 1992, and 2002. Up again this year in the Lead Actor category, Bergman tells Soap Opera Digest, “It still feels fantastic. Here’s the deal. Once a year, my colleagues and I in this business get together, and we all vote on these things. And what this means is there was enough people who thought, ‘He’s one of the good ones’ that I got a nomination. And it feels great. I’ve won my share and I’ve lost more than my share. The real difference is when you win, you actually get to publicly thank people, and when you get to the night, you’re hoping you get to do that.”
Here Comes the Judge
Not only has Bergman been up for Emmy Awards over the past decades, but he’s also helped to decide who goes home with them on the big night. “I’ve been on judging panels every single year for the last, probably, 46 years,” he shares.
However, over that time, the process by which reels are viewed and nominees and winners are selected has changed quite a bit. “We literally used to get together,” Bergman recalls. “We used to run into our friends from General Hospital and Days of Our Lives and Bold and Beautiful at the ABC building, and we’d sit in a room and view a category together. That was really fun.
“And then everybody said, ‘Well, that’s too much to ask the people, so we’ll ask them to sit at home with their computer screen and watch countless hours of this stuff,’ ” he continues. “And they changed it and they changed it and they changed it and they changed it.” One thing that hasn’t changed? “They give me a category that no one I work really closely with is in that category.”
Scene and Heard
While it’s typical for daytime actors to look back through the entirety of their storylines and episodes from the previous year to assemble clips for their Emmy reel, Bergman took a different tact. “This year was a little funny,” he shares. “I take the time to put together a submission, not every single year, but most years. And this year was different than all the others because Melody [Thomas Scott, Nikki] and I did that one episode where it’s just the two of us.” That show, which aired on May 2, 2024, focused on Jack going to extremes to help get Nikki back on the wagon.
“That represented both a really great opportunity and a really bad opportunity,” Bergman explains. “The great opportunity is it was a scene that actually goes somewhere, because it went from one commercial break to another commercial break, just the two of us. That doesn’t [typically] happen. The difficulty in that is that it uses up the limit of what you can submit, time-wise. Hopefully, the people that were watching all of these watched them to the end, because mine ends somewhat dramatically. But you have to wait ’til the very end for the really big payoff. So we’ll see how that plays.”
In Good Company
There are quite a few Y&R actors who are also up for Emmys this year, and while Bergman is particularly happy to see one first-time nominee joining him on the list, he regrets that another co-star didn’t make the cut. “I’m very excited to see Susan Walters [Diane] nominated,” he declares. “I work with her all the time, and I see how much work she puts into it, and her talent is unmistakable, and I was really, really happy to see her get a nod.” On the other hand, “I was a bit disappointed that Melody didn’t get a nod this year, because I thought in the episode we’ve been talking about, she was perfectly brilliant.”
A Night to Remember
As he prepares for the Emmy ceremony on October 17, Bergman admits he no longer believes in lucky charms. “Years ago, when I used to be in New York,” he recalls with a chuckle, “I used to have this special run I would go on in Central Park for good luck, and it worked half the time.”
The actor is simply looking forward to a wonderful night out with his wife, Mariellen, and the Y&R cast and crew. “We’re all set, and Mariellen will be all dolled up,” he reports, “and we’ll go there and run into colleagues from other shows we don’t see except at the Emmys. And we’ll sit with our castmates and laugh it up and hopefully, Y&R will win a bunch of awards.”
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