Rebecca Budig, Greg Rikaart Talk Friendship, Soapy Podcast (Exclusive)

Rebecca Budig and Greg Rikaart are getting lathered up.

The two long-time friends and daytime TV stalwarts and talking all things soap opera in their new CBS podcast, Soapy. The show premiered July 8 with an episode that features The Young and the Restless legend Eric Braeden, known for playing Victor Newman on the long-running series. 

“Rebecca and I were neighbors for close to 20 years,” Rikaart, 48, tells PEOPLE exclusively. Rikaart first found fame — and won a Daytime Emmy — for his role as Kevin Fisher on The Young and the Restless. He joined Days of Ours Lives as Leo Stark in 2018. “We have a really wonderful relationship. It’s got hints of a brother-sister dynamic. It’s very playful, and we tease each other mercilessly.”

Rikaart says that “for a long time,” Budig’s husband Michael Benson and his husband Rob Sudduth have encouraged them to do a project together. 

“I don’t necessarily perceive myself as being interesting enough to be the subject of a podcast,” Rikaart says. “But to host something where we get to talk to other people who I do find to be particularly interesting felt like a really good way to do something like this.” 

“To get to do it with Rebecca, where we have this shared history as friends, as neighbors, but also, between the two of us, we’ve got over 50 years of experience in soap operas,” he adds, “we know how that particular brand of sausage is made.”

Budig, 52, first joined the world of soaps as Michelle Bauer on Guiding Light in 1995. Then in 1999, she joined All My Children as Greenlee Smythe. After AMC was canceled in 2011, she joined General Hospital as Hayden Barnes in 2015. Then, in 2024, she landed at The Bold and the Beautiful as Dr. Taylor Hayes.

Budig tells PEOPLE that with the premiere of a new soap opera, CBS’s Beyond the Gates, earlier this year, “It felt like the right time to sort of celebrate soaps.”

“I think that, at least in the industry, when you are on a soap, you’re at the bottom of the barrel. I just disagree with that. I think we work really hard and there’s lots to celebrate, and I think it’s fun to talk to my coworkers,” she adds. 

“I really did not want to hang out with Greg,” she jokes about her co-host. “I was employed by CBS. I’m like, ‘Really? Really, we can’t get someone else in here?’ ” 

Though Rikaart and Budig have never been castmates (though it’s a possibility, since Y&R and B&B share a universe), their soap opera journeys have also mirrored each other.

“Rebecca and I both shared how, for her, All My Children holds a really special place in the same way that The Young and the Restless does for me because we did so much of our growing up there,” he says. “I was a kid when I started, and then while I was there, I became a homeowner. I got married, I became a father. All of these big milestones all happened to me while I was there in the same way that I think All My Children was that experience for her.” 

Rikaart thinks that because he and Budig are actors, they have a “slightly different perspective” when it comes to interviewing their coworkers and other soap legends. “Oftentimes when they’re sharing an anecdote or something about their experience, we can add onto that and share something that we have experienced doing the same work that is somewhat similar, and it has taken a lot of these conversations and really fun directions,” he says.

In an upcoming episode, he says for example, he and his Y&R costar Tracy Bregman bond over how quickly learning pages and pages of lines for their jobs has warped their short-term memories.

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“I’ve never done a podcast before, so it’s kind of like a new character,” Budig shares of the new show. “We find our footing.”

Soapy is available now wherever you get your podcasts.