Apple TV has its next hit with Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus starring surprise delight, Peter Bergman

Dear Gossips,

Looks like Apple TV, which has been called the most prestige of all the streamers, has its next hit: Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus. Vince Gilligan, of course, is best known for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul so expectations were high ahead of the release of the first two episodes of the series, already greenlit for a second season, with Vince saying he’d ideally like it go four.

I watched episode one last night and I get now why Pluribus is getting so much hype. It’s a banger of a pilot, Rhea Seehorn is outstanding. But there’s another cast member who was a surprise delight: Peter Bergman, perhaps better known as Jack Abbott on The Young & The Restless, a character he’s been playing for 36 – that’s THIRTY-SIX – years. This is not a spoiler, Peter’s face is in the trailer, speaking from the White House.

Turns out Peter and Bryan Cranston have been good friends for a long, long time (because Bryan started out in soap operas), and that’s how he became friends with Vince Gilligan. But Peter would have been perfect for the role even if he and Vince didn’t know each other – specifically because so many people, particularly in America, know him. When you’ve been on daytime for 36 years, even in these media fractured times, people recognise your face! As in…wait, do I know that guy? How do I know that guy?

The Young & The Restless has been on the air since 1973! There are audience members who are now watching it with their kids or grandkids when they used to watch it with their own parents or grandparents. And also, it’s Peter’s specific skillset that Vince Gilligan would have been after. Y&R airs every single f-cking day. Which means the actors on the show are filming every day, for hours, memorising pages and pages of dialogue. This is why, as Duana and I used to talk about often on the Show Your Work podcast any time we hear anyone dismissing the work of soap stars, we can’t take them seriously. Because they’ve just told on themselves that they don’t know sh-t. On a film set, on average, they shoot four or five pages a day.

On soap opera? Easily 30 to 40, if not more. And it’s all talking and micro-expressions! As Peter explained recently when asked about being in Pluribus, he referenced the soap opera skillset:

“And then I read my dialogue, and I realized, ‘[Vince] knows I’ve done a soap, and I can learn copious amounts of complicated dialogue.’ So, I’m in the last seven minutes of the first episode, and I haven’t seen it, so who knows how much of it will make it in, but when you watch it, you’ll understand why we could only shoot it from beginning to end every single time. Once they said, ‘Action,’ I was talking for almost seven pages.”

I just interviewed Peter Bergman and Melody Thomas Scott on the ETALK set a couple of weeks ago. If you had told fifth grade me back then that one day I’d be talking to Jack Abbott and Nikki Newman I would have expired. Y&R was what I watched for years after school, and these two are still doing it! This is a unicorn achievement in the business now – no actors who’ve started out in the last 20 years will be able to say the same.

They were so gracious and grateful that this has been their career. Peter talked about how the work still excites him and how much fun they’re all still having and when I tried to be petty, LOL, and asked them about the dialogue thing, wanting them to dunk on actors who might think they’re too good for the soap circuit, they were classy about it… although they did say, elegantly, that they have had film actors drop in now and again for a cameo and get overwhelmed with all the dialogue. This, again, I repeat, is something the soap stars do every single day.

I’m not saying it would have been easy for Peter Bergman on Pluribus, but when you’re watching his performance on the show, please appreciate how much experience he is bringing to this role.