Eden Riegel Didn’t Know About AMC Lesbian Storyline When She Was Cast

Eden Riegel’s Bianca Montgomery made history on All My Children — but at first, the actress had no idea she would.

Riegel, 44, opened up about her groundbreaking role as Bianca, who is considered the first American daytime character to come out as a lesbian, in a June 13 interview with Remind Magazine. Bianca came out to her mother Erica Kane (daytime legend Susan Lucci) on the Dec. 22, 2000, episode, 25 years ago.

The storyline, Riegel told the outlet, was the brainchild of AMC creator Agnes Nixon, who had become the show’s head writer once again in 1999. “It was one of [Agnes’s] last acts,” she said. Nixon refused to listen to network executives about the storyline’s direction, the actress remembered. “She said, ‘No notes! No notes!’ ” Riegel said. “This was a passion project for her.” 

Bianca had appeared on the series as a child beginning in 1988; one of the actresses who played her before Riegel was Lacey Chabert.

Riegel said Nixon, who died in 2016, purposefully used characters that the audience knew and loved to tell this coming out storyline. “[Agnes] wanted to make sure that the character who came out would be somebody that couldn’t just be quietly written off,” Riegel said. 

But when Riegel was cast as 16-year-old Bianca, she had no idea what the actual storyline was. “I knew that there was a lot of angst involved [in her storyline], but no, I booked the part and then, they brought me into [executive producer] Jean Dadario Burke’s office, and the head writer was there too,” Riegel said. “They needed to make sure that I would be okay with this. By that I mean, would I be okay with [possibly] receiving hate mail or being pigeonholed into [certain roles]. They didn’t even know my personal beliefs.” 

Riegel’s older sister Tatiana, an Oscar-nominated film editor, is gay. “They told me Bianca was going to come out as gay,” the actress told the outlet. “I sat there and I waited for them to tell me what the ‘big thing’ was because I was, like, ‘Okay! What’s next?’ I didn’t see what the big deal was. But I could tell how serious they were taking it and they were clearly invested.”  

Soon the gravity of the plotline sank in. “I got the picture pretty fast that I also needed to approach it with a similar level of investment and humanity, because I was being put into the minds of people who possibly had never met another gay person in their life,” she said. 

After chatting with her older sister, Riegel realized Bianca was “just like every other character I’ve ever played. I just need to relate to her as a human being and tell her story.”  

Back in 2001, Riegel reflected on the storyline to PEOPLE, explaining, “I wanted to make sure they were going to do it in a responsible way, that it wasn’t just for the sensationalism of it.” In 2003, Riegel and Olga Sosnovska, who played Lena, made history with daytime’s first lesbian kiss. Then in 2009, Bianca married her girlfriend Reese (Tamara Baun), the first lesbian wedding in soap history.

“People would write me or come up on the street saying, ‘I didn’t want Erica Kane’s daughter to be gay, but I found myself pulled into this story again and again,’ ” Riegel told The New York Times in 2005 about the reaction to her character. 

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Just as impactful was Lucci’s Erica. “I heard from kids who watched the show with their parents and came out because they saw, with their mom and dad, how Erica Kane responded,” Riegel explained to the outlet. “To see Erica — who every man wants and every woman wants to be — to see her go through this, it helped a lot of moms say, ‘I’m not going to close myself off to this.’ That was remarkable.”

Riegel won a 2005 Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Younger Actress in a Drama Series for her role as Bianca. She left AMC in 2010, and ABC canceled the series a year later. Most recently, she’s worked as a voice director for animated series like Zombies: The Re-Animated Series and Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures.