The Young and the Restless unveiled a big surprise to make its 13,000th episode even more special by reconstructing one of its most iconic locales: the Newman ranch.
The set, which burned down as part of a 2012 story, was not a popular choice at the time or in the years since. “It was an outrage and one of the dumbest decisions ever,” declares Eric Braeden, who plays Victor Newman, the ranch’s owner.
Nevertheless, the actor was surprised by his own sentimental reaction to seeing it brought back to life. “To be frank with you, when they asked me to take a look at it, I thought, ‘Oh, well,’ ” Braeden shrugs. “And then I sat there and I was a little overwhelmed. I really was touched because the old set meant so much to the Nikki/Victor relationship. And they did a wonderful job. I was just flooded with emotions because it’s stepping back into a milieu that we’ve almost forgotten about. It touched me. It really did.”
Braeden joined Y&R in 1980, intending to stay for a short spell; 44 years later, he is the face most associated with it. “I signed for three months and that’s all I wanted to do,” he explains. But a conversation with the show’s co-creator and former head writer, William J. Bell, changed the course of Braeden’s life and career.
Sonja Flemming/CBS
“I was asked if I would extend,” he recalls. “And I thought about that for a while and said, ‘OK, make it a year.’ After about a year, I really didn’t want to continue and I went to Bill and I said, ‘Bill, unless you ascribe a background to this character that justifies who he is or explains who he is, I don’t want to play bad guys anymore. I’ve done it for too many years on nighttime and I’m burned out. It’s dehumanizing. I can’t do it anymore.’ And two months later, he came up with the brilliant storyline. Once I had done that, where Victor explained to Nikki that he had grown up in an orphanage, I went to my dressing room, called home, and said, ‘I’m staying.’ Because I realized that from then on, the character would assume enormous complexity and that’s what attracted me to it. And that’s why I’m still here because you don’t get that kind of character, certainly not on nighttime. It was a brilliant stroke and that’s really the only reason that I’m here. I would have left, period.”
Now, the Newman family is one of the driving forces on the 51-year-old soap. “It means everything to me; I’d be a phony if I said that it doesn’t mean anything,” Braeden shares. “To get affirmation of what one has done is a wonderful feeling.”
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Braeden’s favorite episodes are ones that have touched upon Victor’s roots. “Very simply, the time that Victor’s mother showed up [in 1984],” he relays. “Dorothy McGuire played my mother [Cora Miller]. It is one of the most memorable scenes for me, and it explains so much of Victor’s character, and the deep hurt and the deep pain in him and anger in him at a mother who had abandoned him when he was seven years old. That all came out in that scene, in one take, and that’s arguably my most favorite scene. Another scene was with George Kennedy, who played my father [Albert Miller], when I finally confronted him [in 2003] for the first time in my adult life. That was fraught with enormously deep emotions. Those are two of my most memorable scenes. There were others, obviously, with Mel [Thomas Scott, Nikki Newman] and Peter Bergman [Jack Abbott], but the scenes that really encapsulate who Victor Newman is are those two scenes with the mother and the father.”
Regarding Scott, the actor appreciates the endurance of Nikki and Victor’s romance, which Braeden feels has a lot to do with their real-life dynamic. “Mel and I get along,” he explains. “We get along very well and Mel knows how to deal with me. There is chemistry between people, and if there isn’t, you can’t manufacture it, you can’t write it. It’s there or it isn’t and we’re lucky that it is. It’s really as simple as it is and as complicated as it is. You can’t foresee that, you really can’t. It’s a confluence of what the writers did and what the two personalities bring to the scenes and to each other.”
Braeden also enjoys that the show has mined so much drama out of Victor’s complicated rivalry with Jack. “Peter [Bergman] and I work well together as adversaries, and that’s another thing that either works or doesn’t work, and it works,” he points out. Jack is currently in Victor’s crosshairs once again. “Victor gets even with people, and he has not forgiven that night of debauchery between Jack and Nikki [in May],” sniffs Braeden. “He thinks hanky panky went on and Victor doesn’t forgive or forget that.”
With Victor still front and center in the story, the 83-year-old Braeden has no plans to retire anytime soon. “I will not, I don’t want to,” he insists. Especially with his health in a good place. “I feel very well. I really do,” he reports. “The [bladder] cancer is under control and I will have another cystoscopy in about a month, and if that is negative, then I’ll be free for a while. It’s never gone completely. You have to always watch, but signs are very good. The new knee is fully repaired. I do squats again and power cleans again and all that.”
Monty Brinton/CBS
As the show is set to mark 13,000 episodes on November 13, Braeden says he has a lot to be thankful for. “I am deeply grateful,” he reflects. “We have complaints about this or that; that’s inevitable in the creative process. But very often on the way to work, I look around as I drive through town. I remember the place where I first walked in L A, and I cross it every day, but I had barely a penny in my pocket. At this point, I’m very, very fortunate, and rarely has a writer created something that fits me so well. I disagree with a lot of what Victor Newman does, but the emotional components are there and I agree with them completely. It’s easy for me to play. I love it. I have wonderful coworkers in Melody, Peter Bergman, Joshua Morrow [Nick Newman], Amelia Heinle [Victoria Newman], Melissa Ordway [Abby Newman], Mark Grossman [Adam Newman], Jason Thompson [Billy Abbott] and Michelle Stafford [Phyllis Summers]. All wonderful actors. I feel really good about it. We’re still number one.”
The Young and the Restless, Weekdays, CBS
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