Y&R Exclusive: Beth Maitland Says ‘Traci Will Find A Way To Survive’ Alan Heartbreak

It’s good news/bad news for Traci Abbott on Young and Restless. The good news? She wasn’t killed by Martin Laurent, the psycho who posed as his twin Alan to seduce her, who was carted off to jail after taking over Alan’s life. The bad news? Alan is dead, and Traci is once again nursing a broken heart — not to mention a guilty conscience over the trauma Martin inflicted on other people in Genoa City while pulling the wool over her eyes. Soap Opera Digest checked in with Traci’s beloved portrayer, Beth Maitland, about the latest tragedy to befall her resilient character, of whom she declares, “Our Traci is a survivor.”

 

Soap Opera Digest: Let me begin by saying how relieved I am that Traci made it out of this terrible ordeal alive!

Beth Maitland (laughs): I did have some questions when the scripts started coming in! I was a little worried, I have to admit.

Digest: Did you discover Traci’s fate in the script, or were your concerns alleviated in advance?

Maitland: Nobody tells me anything! I wait, and then the scripts come and that’s when I learn what’s going on next week. [But I figured], “If I’ve got another date [to tape at the Y&R studio] on the calendar, you’re probably not dead.”

Digest: As the scripts started rolling in and you got a sense of where the storyline was going, were you pleased that there wasn’t a lot of time where you had to play Traci as in the dark, that she did start to put the pieces together relatively quickly?

Maitland: Yes and no. That’s a hard question to answer because my desire is always for a longer-term storyline. I love the old-fashioned way of telling stories, when it took sometimes months for stories to build up to the giant climax and for little nuggets to be dropped along the way. Planting the seeds, building the romance, building the relationship, moving him to Genoa City, all of that took a long time to build up to. The shocking part that happens [with the reveal that “Alan”‘ was really Martin] was just a few weeks, so I wish that part had actually been a little prolonged. But the fact that Traci does get to be involved in finding the texts on the phone, getting to talk to Sharon and what happened to her and Phyllis and the kidnapping to start twigging her, and making all of these pieces connect, I loved that part. Traci is a novelist, she’s a writer, she’s got a great imagination. Right now, Aunt Traci is everybody’s shoulder to cry on, but in this story, we get to actually remember there’s a lot more to her than that. So I do love that she got to be a part of putting the pieces together, although I love for things to take a while to be revealed, and I love for things to be a gigantic surprise — you know, like a mic drop moment.

Digest: I do think that the audience would have had a hard time watching Traci have the wool pulled over her eyes for too long; as much as we know her to want to see the best in people, we don’t want her to be made a fool of! Viewers care deeply about Traci, which I think was proven by how happy they were when Alan first came into her life.

Maitland: I’ll tell you, I really think about this a lot. I take it very seriously — both personally as Beth and as an actor — that over the decades, I represent a certain percentage of the population, women over a certain age. It really matters to me that I bring authenticity to the playing of that, a role that is really unique in all of daytime. I revel in, and am constantly flattered and appreciate that viewers often reach out and tell me that it matters to them too, and that I represent them. So, I was really worried when this went south with Martin being the evil twin, being the bad guy, that this would make Traci look foolish. And she’s not!

Hearkening back to her getting to put the pieces together, I think that sort of saves it, it saves the big letdown she has as part of the story — and that viewers have on her behalf — that she’s never going to get her happy ending. I’m super-grateful that they did not make Traci look foolish. I think the character gets a chance to say, “So, who am I now, that I didn’t see this coming?” She takes it really seriously that it’s impacted her family, and how she is responsible for bringing him into their home, but also Phyllis and Sharon, who are innocent bystanders in all of this. She’s devastated. She really feels responsible. But to your point, I am so grateful and appreciative that there are so many people that, after all these years, continue to really relate to Traci and tell me personally that they feel seen through me. It just means so much to me, so I work very hard to make sure that that stays the root of it all. I always joke that Traci is sort of like a non-cussing version of myself. We’ve kind of grown together. I was nothing like Traci at the beginning and now I am Traci, except I cuss [laughs].

Digest: Traci’s heartbreak over her happy ending slipping through her fingers is palpable. What was it like to play out those emotional scenes?

Maitland: I cry at Hallmark commercials. I cry if things don’t go well in the Starbucks line! I think as an actor, especially one that plays a character like Traci, who’s very emotional in the first place, we keep our toolbox kind of close under the surface. I think if I was a bank teller, this wouldn’t happen; I wouldn’t cry about everything in public. But because I’m an actor, sometimes it happens and it’s surprising. So I keep those emotions very close to the surface. Also, a factor is the pace at which we work nowadays, because we shoot five episodes in four days. The workload is intense and tremendous and usually, we do things in one take. I joke with new actors and tell them, “If you get partway through a scene and you don’t like how it’s going, you kind of have to fall down or they won’t stop. It’ll end up on TV!” For scenes that involve that kind of emotion, it’s a mechanism of doing this for a long period of time that [my emotions] are right there under the surface, so it’s easier for me than one might think.

A character like Nick Newman doesn’t need to cry all the time, so [Joshua Morrow, Nick] would have a very different answer to that question. But because it’s our Traci and because it’s me playing her, I love [calling upon] that emotion. Back in the day, there was a storyline involving the death of Traci’s daughter, Colleen, and I cried for 30 episodes. 30 episodes! That’s over a month’s worth of viewing. It’s exhausting in a way, but when you leave the building, you don’t have to go to your therapist. You got it all out! It’s like, “Huh, now that’s over.” There are a lot of funny, actor-y things involved in that, in being able to produce emotion when it’s required. For me, it was a lot of fun, especially looking across the table or across the couch at Peter Bergman [Jack], in whose eyes you can just drown. He’s like the real brother I never had in real life. He’s so dear to me, and this matters to him — the work matters so much. Peter and Eileen [Davidson, Ashley], there is no place I would rather be than working with those two actors. Everybody in the [Abbott] family, we are all so connected that all we have to do is just look up at each other and the tears are there. So that is a great relief. Then it just becomes about learning your lines and making sure that you don’t fall down and it was very fun to just let go, to just let it out and see where it takes you.

Digest: In your view, what kind of imprint does this whole trauma leave on Traci?

Maitland: Even in her early days, there has been so much trauma and tragedy in her life that what we definitely know about our Traci is that she is a survivor. No matter what happens, no matter what she’s left with, no matter what self-recrimination or doubts she may have, [feeling] that she should have seen warning signs or seen this coming, our Traci will find a way to survive it. She will overcome it, she will bounce back, she will go on and she will move forward. It is a very odd parallel to my life that oddly, on the other side of a lot of personal tragedy, it actually makes a character much more appealing, more layered, and more attractive to others — that even in the face of the unthinkable, the fact that you can find a way to go on makes you a superhero.

Digest: Couldn’t agree more. Is there anything else you want to say before I let you go?

Maitland: The only thing is that I always want the audience to know how much they inform what we do, and I am so grateful that we have the most amazing viewers who have watched since the first day, or for 30 years or some other significant amount of time. Only in daytime do we have fans who have decades invested in our storytelling. They treat us and think of us as part of their family because we’re in their living room every day. The viewers mean so much to all of us, and I want them to know how much every actor on the show appreciates you, how much it means to us that you’re there for us, and more importantly, you’re why we do this. Our viewers are the only reason we’re still on television and I just want to appreciate and acknowledge how much a part of our journey they are.

What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted? Traci has some major healing to do after discovering that she was on the verge of marrying her beloved Alan’s evil twin, Martin (Christopher Cousins).