Peter Bergman Reveals His Most Challenging Y&R Storyline

Characters on soaps go through all kinds of drama during their lives, and actors have to play all of it out on screen, no matter what the storyline might be. And during his 34 years on THE YOUNG & THE RESTLESS, Peter Bergman has seen Jack Abbott through it all!

Over the course of three decades, Bergman admitted that the most surprising storyline twist was Jack discovering he had a son named Keemo. “That came from far left field and smacked me alongside the head,” the actor confided to Soap Opera Digest. “It’s worth saying Jack is younger than I am, so Peter Bergman could have gone to Vietnam at the very end of things there, but it was a stretch that Jack had served.”

However, it was the 2015 storyline where the daytime vet was tasked with playing Jack’s look-alike Marco Annicelli that he found most challenging to play. As fans will remember Victor took advantage of Jack’s absence to use Marco to take over his rival’s life, and things naturally spiraled out of control as the villain ran rampant in Genoa City.

“It was one writer deciding there’s a guy in a prison down in South America who looks and sounds exactly like Jack, that the woman in his life wouldn’t recognize the difference,” Bergman said. “It was so hard to do and I was just dying every day trying to make it work. I felt I was failing at playing somebody whose native language is not English and is faking being Jack. It was just a daunting task and I don’t think I did very well at it.”

Well, thankfully, that was just one storyline out of many, and Bergman still has plenty of other storylines — and three Daytime Emmy Awards! — that prove what a talented actor he is.