Jack was naturally concerned when he regained consciousness and discovered he was being held prisoner on a boat on Young and Restless, but the situation became even more dangerous when he found out last week that his captor was none other than his infamously unstable ex-wife, Patty Williams, once again played by Stacy Haiduk. Soap Opera Digest chatted with Jack’s portrayer, Peter Bergman, to get the scoop on Jack’s reunion from hell and what will happen next as the saga continues to unfold.
Reunited and it Feels So Good
As unpleasant a sight as Patty was for Jack’s sore eyes, Bergman was thrilled to encounter Haiduk again backstage at Y&R. “We saw each other in the makeup room, and it was like I saw her last week,” he recalls. “She talked about her daughter, who’s now a grown woman, who was a young teenager when I knew her, and got all caught up on that. And I caught her up on my life and my kids and grandchild and all of that business. So yeah, [it was] great fun.”
The actor was excited to get to work with Haiduk again. “She’s a very good actress,” he notes. “She’s proven herself in daytime television, and a lot was asked of her [in this arc]. You can’t just grab any actress in daytime television and have her do what Stacy Haiduk is doing!” Bergman adds, “There is a kind of spontaneous magic to her. You rehearse and rehearse, and somehow, they say, ‘Five, four, three, two, one,’ and it’s something completely different than you’ve seen [her do in rehearsal], and that’s fun. That’s exciting for an actor. She’s an actress who brings brand-new stuff right up to the last minute.”
Haiduk hasn’t been on Y&R since 2016, so she and Bergman hadn’t worked together in many years. But stepping back onto set, Bergman says he found it “very easy” to fall right back into a rhythm as performers. “’And there are some physical things in these scenes that might be awkward to do with some actresses,” he admits. “Not with Stacy. Stacy Haiduk throws her whole body into a scene, and so it made it easier for me.”
Sorry Not Sorry: Patty (Stacy Haiduk) has a lot to make up for, like shooting Jack (Peter Bergman) a second time!sean smith/jpistudios.com
The Devil You Know
Coming face-to-face with the unstable woman who had shot him more than once was naturally unsettling for Jack, who had to overcome his fears in order to figure out a way to escape. Describing Jack as “initially quite scared,” Bergman points out that his alter ego has “no idea if she’s got a weapon, no idea how this happened, no idea what to expect.” But with Patty in the mix, he does know that things “could get very dangerous very fast. He saw the very best of Patty many years ago — and he saw the very worst of Patty before she was taken away. She did a lot of damage in this town.”
While Patty claims to have been released from the psychiatric facility where she’d been receiving treatment, Jack is too smart to just take her at her word. “I think there are moments where Jack says, ‘Wow, maybe this is for real,’” Bergman allows. “Or at the very least, she believes with everything in her that she’s here to make amends. You know, nobody understands forgiveness better than people who need to be forgiven, and Jack has needed to be forgiven more than a few times in his life.”
Of course, as longtime viewers know, this isn’t the first time that Jack has been held hostage by a spurned lover. Back in 2015, the mogul was abducted by Kelly Andrews (Cady McClain) and chained to a bed, and Bergman says that Jack’s current ordeal reminded him of that Kelly drama. “He’s not been lucky in love in many cases,” Bergman chuckles. “He’s been here before, but it doesn’t make him any better at it — [it’s not like] ‘Oh good, now I know what’s going on, I’m being held hostage!'”
As for the advice he would offer to Jack, Bergman jokes, “I think you should stay on very good terms with the people you were once in love with,” he jokes. “It can come back to bite you any day. There are prices to be paid for sins of the past.”
Nowhere To Run: Jack (pictured with Cady McClain’s Kelly) knows what it’s like to be held hostage by a jilted lover.sean smith/jpistudios.com
Games People Play
Convinced that Victor Newman (Eric Braeden) is behind this whole kidnapping plot, Jack decided to try to woo Patty over to his side. Bergman explains, “His whole plan was to get her to think that it’s working, that Jack’s falling for her, Jack’s being kind to her, listening to her, and before she knows it, she sees a very compliant Jack, and that’s really what she’s after.” Patty claimed she wanted to make amends with Jack, but it’s clear that she was also after another chance with her ex. Notes Bergman, “It’s worth saying, Victor sent her there, [but] she would have done this for free!”
Given Patty’s decades-long obsession with Jack, Bergman emphasizes that toying with her affections “is dangerous. It’s a difficult game to play. Who’s playing who here? She suspects he’s playing her. He said, ‘I feel like you’re playing me.’ They do this dance for a while.”
That dance led them into bed on Friday’s episode, which ended with a big cliffhanger after Jack landed between the sheets with the deranged Patty as his wife, Diane (Susan Walters), frantically tried to track him down before it’s too late. And Bergman says that the drama aboard the yacht is only the start of a much larger storyline — one with ripple effects for everyone in Jack’s life. “As big as this seems,” he teases, “it is just a spark for the fuse. What this portends for Jack’s life is so much bigger than what you see on screen [right now]. Jack’s life is forever changed on that yacht. The repercussions of what happened on that boat will affect Jack’s life for years to come. There will be scars.”
All Mine: Jack was putty in Patty’s hands.HOWARD WISE/JPI
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