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Heather Tom loved working with Eric Braeden — but it left her on her toes.
On the Aug. 12 episode of the Soapy podcast, hosted by Days of Our Lives’ Greg Rikaart and The Bold and the Beautiful’s Rebecca Budig, Tom and Lawrence Saint-Victor opened up about their soap careers in front of and behind the camera.
Tom got started in daytime soaps playing Victoria Newman on The Young and the Restless from 1990 to 2003. Then, for three years, she played Kelly Cramer on One Life to Live. Since 2007, she’s played Katie Logan on The Bold and the Beautiful, where she also began working as a director and a writer. Saint-Victor, who plays Carter Walton on the show, also writes for the series
Budig noted that Tom, 49, was “lucky” to join shows where she was part of an “established family,” and the actress admitted, “I feel lucky.”
CBS via Getty; Sonja Flemming/CBS via Getty
When Tom joined The Young and the Restless as Victoria, she brought the role, which had been portrayed by a child actor, into her teenage and early adult years. She knew that Victoria’s family — the Newmans — were important because her grandmother was a viewer, she said on the podcast.
But she still had a major learning curve.
“I remember my first scenes were with Eric Braeden, who I adore,” she said. Braeden, 84, has played Victoria’s father Victor Newman since 1980. “But he never says the same thing,” Tom said.
“So I felt like I was playing like double dutch, where I was just like, ‘Alright, when do I jump in? When do I jump in?’ ” she remembered. “He would go on a tangent sometimes, and I would be like, ‘How do I get the scene back to where I’m supposed to go?’ ”
She called working with him “so much fun” but “high pressure,” adding it was “such a good learning experience.”
Monty Brinton/CBS via Getty
Tom said that she also loved being “a Kramer girl” on OLTL, and loved that her character, Kelly, was “so different” from Victoria. And on The Bold and the Beautiful, Jennifer Gareis and Katherine Kelly Lang, who play her character’s sisters Donna and Kelly, are like her real sisters.
“We bicker, we’re competitive with each other, but at the end of the day we love each other so much,” she said. “I know that they would have my back.”
Back in March, Tom told PEOPLE there was a very specific scene with Braeden that had her “scared”: when Victoria slapped Victor.
“No one gets to slap Victor Newman,” Tom said about the iconic scene. “And so it was a big deal, and I was scared. I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I was scared, literally.”
“I knew that this was coming up,” she explained of the moment, which had Victoria lash out at her dad for running her boyfriend out of town. “I was like, ‘Well, I don’t really know [where] this thing’s going to go afterwards, so I guess we’re just going to jump in.’ But yeah, it played very well. It’s something that people definitely remember, but I do vividly remember shooting that. And yeah, it was a thing.”
Tom won two Daytime Emmys for her work on The Young and the Restless. She’s since won four more for her work on The Bold and the Beautiful.
