Young and the Restless star Joshua Morrow believes his character, Nick Newman, will always be around Genoa City.
“At the risk of sounding overly confident, my character is pretty central to the show,” Morrow, 50, exclusively told Us Weekly while celebrating the long-running soap’s 13,000th episode. “There will always be a Nick Newman, whether it’s me playing him or not. [That] is up to me and the show, but Nick will always be around.”
Morrow added, “I have no concerns about that. I hope that doesn’t come across as anything less than just knowing what the character brings to the show. It has nothing to do with me. I don’t want to come across that way, but, you know, the Newman family is very important.”
Morrow joined YATR in 1994 when he debuted the role of Nicholas “Nick” Newman, who is the son of Victor Newman (Eric Braeden) and Nikki Newman (Melody Thomas Scott, replacing Erica Hope).
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“Nick Newman is very important to the family, so he will always be around,” Morrow concluded.
After 30 years and thousands of episodes later, Morrow is just “proud” to have made an impact on the YATR world and fanbase.
“We hear it a lot, but I never grow tired of hearing that. It’s everything,” he gushed to Us of the show’s passionate and longtime viewers. “To hear about people who have invested that much time of their life in us. It just makes me feel so proud.”
Seeing the fans continue to be invested in the YATR universe brings a certain level of pride for Morrow and his cohort of actors considering “how hard [they] work.”
“I mean, we have to learn basically a play every day, like, the amount of work that we have to put in studying, being on point — because we’re now at a point in time where we have to have most things in one take, which is very stressful,” Morrow said. “I like the competitive part of that, but you don’t want to be the person that is not fulfilling and delivering in that one opportunity that they’re hoping for.”
Joshua Morrow as Nicholas Newman and Eric Braeden as Victor Newman on ‘The Young and the Restless’ Sonja Flemming/CBS
Morrow further cited his “pretty sharp memory” in terms of how he can memorize the dialogue to accommodate the quick filming turnaround.
“I’ve been blessed with a pretty sharp memory when it comes to that,” he said. “I don’t even look at my lines until I get to work in the morning. I just have to read it a few times quietly to myself. It doesn’t even help me to run them with people. … I need to be alone. I need to say them by myself a few times and I’m good to go.”
Morrow continued, “I honestly learn about 80 [to] 85 percent of it and I make up the rest, meaning I’m just, sort of, interjecting my own personality in it because nobody knows Nick as well as I do. So they trust me to sort of make it my own in the way that I do, and that’s how you go about it.”
While Morrow has been privy to a number of story lines through the years, one still tops them all.
“My favorite storyline is the Nick, Sharon [and] Phyllis triangle. It came out of a horrible circumstance on the show of the death of Cassie, but it became this incredible triangle.” Morrow said. “I got to work with two amazing, rock star women in Sharon Case and Michelle Stafford. I’m only as good as [them].”
Nick and Sharon have been a longtime YATR power couple, even staying strong when she reunited with daughter Cassie after giving up the child for adoption. Cassie (Cameron Grimes) was ultimately killed off in a car accident in 2005 before her adoptive father Nick began an affair with Phyllis. Since then, Nick and Sharon’s marriage has been on and off.
“They’ve brought me along to be their incredible talents, so we still get to mine that story a lot,” Morrow teased. “That triangle is always ever present and just an awesome, awesome story to tell.”
Cassie’s death, meanwhile, was the hardest YATR scene for Morrow to film.
“At that point in my life, I’d never experienced loss. I was very lucky that everyone that I loved was still around me, so to have to go to that place on air and it just was uncomfortable,” Morrow told Us. “It wasn’t something I was ever accustomed to and it was hard not to let that take over me personally, in my real life.”
He added, “I tried to separate the two, but dealing with that story line was very, very difficult. You see this little girl who means so much to me, have to pretend to die in front of you and it was really hard for me. That’s my least favorite, but it’s also a great story for us. We still tell it.”
With reporting by Lanae Brody
