Young and Restless’s Sharon Case Promises ‘I’m Gonna Give Him Hell’ As Sharon Takes On Matt Clark (Excl)
Over the course of her 31-year career playing Sharon on Young and Restless, Sharon Case has had to do on-screen battle with more than a few villains — including ones she thought were dead! Late last month, the show kicked off a new arc for the character featuring the surprise return of one of the baddest bad guys ever to darken her doorstep, Matt Clark, now played by daytime vet Roger Howarth. Soap Opera Digest checked in with the Daytime Emmy-winning actress for her take on Matt’s resurrection and to tease what Sharon fans can expect as the story progresses.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Case found out that Matt, Sharon’s teenage beau turned tormentor, was heading back to the Genoa City universe the way so many daytime actors learn of major upcoming twists: by hearing whispers of it on the set. Recalls Case, “I heard it in passing when I was just on stage and people were hanging around talking. I heard the name Matt Clark and I then said to Josh [Morrow, Nick], ‘I heard there’s going to be a Matt Clark storyline! Oh my gosh!’ I knew that Noah [Lucas Adams] was coming back and that he had been in an accident and was in the hospital, but that’s all I knew. So when I heard about Matt Clark, I said to [Head Writer/Executive Producer] Josh Griffith when I saw him, ‘Oh, I heard this is a Matt Clark storyline. How exciting!'”
The actress was immediately on board. “I love when they bring Sharon’s old villains back from the past,” she enthuses, “and they’re still after her, like Cameron Kirsten [Linden Ashby] was — and I loved everything we did with Cameron Kirsten. I was like, ‘It’s not over! We keep playing this kind of stuff, because now Matt Clark’s come back!’ I think of it in terms of this being classic soap opera storytelling, you know? There’s always villains coming back from the dead! Nobody’s ever really dead. Sheila Carter [Kimberlin Brown] came back over and over again, we had Diane [Susan Walters] come back … That’s just one of the great things, the silliness or greatness or whatever you want to call it, about soaps: People always come back! And I’m glad that I have another soapy, fun story to tell.”
Only The Good Die Young
Many men (and women) have stirred up trouble for Sharon over the course of her years of Genoa City residency, but Matt Clark, who was originally played by Eddie Cibrian, was the first genuine bad guy she had to contend with and was part of her introductory storyline back in 1994. “He was always a bad guy, even in the early days,” Case notes. “He was doing bad things and Sharon had to survive him, you know? He raped her, he attacked her, he attacked Nick. He falsely accused Nick of attempted murder [when he was shot in 1995; the true culprit turned out to be Amy Wilson, another young woman Matt had raped] and got him put in prison. I mean, he was doing bad stuff from the very beginning!”
The character’s villainy kicked up a notch (or several!) when he came back to town in the early 2000s and the role was taken over by Rick Hearst, who now plays Ric Lansing on General Hospital. “Fabulous actor,” praises Case. “He was wonderful to work with and I remember when he kidnapped Sharon, we shot some scenes [on location] and we did an overnight shoot up in a cabin in Griffith Park. It was the first time I ever did an overnight shoot where your call time is late, once it gets back, and you’re shooting all evening. That was really fun.”
Matt Clark 3.0, as played by Howarth, is an even more formidable enemy, Case says. “He just gets worse and worse with age [laughs]! He gets more and more full of rage and vendettas. He started out bad — I mean, he’s obviously disturbed — but he just gets angrier and angrier at the world and takes it out on Sharon and Nick! And now we have Roger [Howarth] in the role, and he’s amazing. I’m thankful and grateful that I get to work with him.”
I See Dead People
Howarth made his Y&R debut when Sharon bumped into “Mitch Bacall,” as Matt is now calling himself, outside of The Shadow Room, the Los Angeles nightclub he runs with wife Sienna (Tamara Braun) — and the second she lay eyes on him, Sharon knew exactly who he really was. But given that Matt had a notorious on-screen death back in 2001, when the hospitalized villain yanked out his breathing tube and placed it in Nick’s arms to frame Nick for murder, playing the moment required Case to pull out a special, soap-honed skill: reacting to the sight of a supposedly dead person!
Says Case, “When someone comes back from the dead, the actors often make fun of or talk about, ‘How do you really play this? How do you react in a scene when you realize somebody’s not dead and you see them for the first time and you’re like, “Oh, you’re not dead!”‘ Like, that generally doesn’t happen in real life, so we don’t know what expression goes on your face in that scene! I remember I had to play a scene in the coffeehouse where I realized Diane Jenkins is not dead. This is not a person of significance to Sharon, but you’ve still got to play it! It’s just part of soap operas and we love that. So, I had to do that on the Halloween show, when I see Matt Clark at the club. That was probably my best one because I’ve been getting good at it lately [laughs].”
In the moment, she muses, “What I was trying to convey was shock and fear and horror. He was that horrible to her, and he’s that horrible of a memory, but also, she’s seeing a ghost! It was Halloween when it aired, so I was kind of trying to make it jarring and scary to go along with the spookiness of the holiday, but I think even if it weren’t Halloween, that’s still what he brings about or evokes from Sharon, for sure. She’s rattled to the core.”
Never Let Them See You Sweat
Given their ugly history, Sharon has good reason to be terrified of seeing Matt in the flesh, but when she got in his face on the November 12 episode, demanding that he ‘fess up to not being Mitch, she was hardly cowering in fear. Observes the actress, “I think Sharon starts getting tougher and very upset and angry with him when she confronts him. Seeing him again makes her anger come back and it reminds her of all of the horrible things that he did and the games that he played and his lies. I think she’s just disgusted and angry as all get-out.”
And highly determined to get him to admit that he is not who he claims to be. Case thinks that after hallucinating Cameron last year, there is “a tiny bit of her that maybe questions” whether she’s wrong about Matt’s identity. “Sharon has been through a lot and was imagining seeing Cameron, so she does check herself, like, ‘Am I losing it?'” But that self-doubt is but a blip. “She knows that he’s lying,” Case asserts. “She knows he’s back, so he lied about his death and he’s going to cause trouble, so of course she wants him to admit that he’s Matt Clark!”
While self-preservation is a strong incentive, protecting her son, Noah, is an even bigger one. And in the wake of Noah’s car crash, not to mention the fact that he was having an affair with Mrs. Mitch Bacall, her mama bear instincts go into high gear. “She doesn’t know exactly what’s going on or how all this could have happened,” the actress says. “Did Matt seek out Noah on purpose? Could it have been accident [and not a deliberate attempt on Noah’s life]? She and Nick keep coming up with different ideas and theories, and they’re constantly trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. They haven’t figured it out yet, but Sharon is still trying, and it just makes it all the more confusing that Matt won’t admit that he’s Matt! He won’t explain to her, ‘Yeah, I’ve been watching you for years, and I came after your son.’ He won’t admit any of that!
“It’s maddening,” Case continues. “She’s been through a lot lately and to have this guy doing this and not admitting who he is, it just gets to the point where it’s just pure anger pouring out of her.”
His denials only fuel Sharon’s resolve to unpack the mystery. “I think she feels that she has to keep going after the truth,” Case reasons. “She’s forced to be determined to do so because Matt Clark is connected to Sienna and Sienna is connected to Sharon’s son, so she is in this whether she wants to be or not. The only way out is the way through!”
Guess Again
Where the story goes from here, says Case, will take viewers by surprise. “Just when you think, ‘Oh, okay, we know Matt Clark, he’s a bad guy, he’s probably gonna just do X, Y or Z bad thing, ‘it turns in a way that you wouldn’t think. And then just when you think you’ve gotten ahold of that and that you get the storyline, it twists again. Coming back from the dead is a classic soap story,” she adds, “but what is not necessarily common is the different twists that we have over and over again. I think the audience won’t be able to guess who comes into the story next and how it turns.”
One thing is for certain, though: If Matt thinks that he’ll have an easy time victimizing Sharon, he’s in for an unpleasant surprise. “I’m gonna give him hell!” assures Case.
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