Late-breaking News
Fan fave Jess Walton (Jill) was filming at the Y&R set and guested on Digest’s podcast, Dishing With Digest, where she discussed her comings and goings from Genoa City.
Of her most recent returns, she noted, “Well, it’s just really interesting. I was up in Oregon a few months back and I had just talked to Mal [Young] on the phone, our producer, and he was asking me what I wanted to do and everything. My husband [John James] was ill for a while, he’s better now, and at the time I said, ‘Well, I kind of want to spend more time with him,’ so they let me. He’s better now, so I said I wanna work a little more, so I think they’re gonna let me. I thought, ‘How great is this? To have a job that I love on this wonderful soap that I’ve been part of for maybe 31 years now and this wonderful man, Mal, who makes it so easy for me and he really treats me with a lot of respect and he’s always telling me that the audience loves me.’ He makes me feel so good. I thought, ‘Wow, what have I ever done to deserve this perfect job position I’m in?’, you know?”
Walton revealed that the ouster of Tristan Rogers (excolin) in 2011 played a factor in her decision to pull back on playing Jill and acknowledged that she was aware that it could spell an end to her run. “They had let Tristan go and I hadn’t had a real good story in a long time except with that one and then they let him go and I was furious,” she confided. “I thought, ‘I’m done with this.’ Anyway, our kids wanted to move up to Oregon and our son wanted to have his babies up there and we thought, ‘Well, we’re at retirement age. I might as well just retire.’ I went in and I asked them if I could have six months off and they said, ‘By all means. If you want to come back, come back.’ That’s when I went up there. I think
it was six months, a full six months I didn’t work, and then I think it [Y&R] came under a new producer and I called up to congratulate them and they said, ‘Would you come back?’ And then I said, ‘Yeah, I think I would like to,’ ’cause I thought I was gonna become a mystery writer or something up there on the ranch and it just didn’t happen! I came back and it was really fun. It was when Jeanne [Cooper, ex-katherine] was still alive. It was so good to see her. I had missed her so horribly when I was up there.”
Nowadays, Walton works with the show to figure out her schedule. “Well, I mean there’s the general thing that they want to know how much I wanna work and I tell them,” she explained. “I think we’re about a month and a half ahead of when it airs, so when they’re thinking of doing a story, it’s a few weeks probably before that they check my availability because I’m not on contract, I’m on recurring, so they have to check my availability. That’s how it works out.”
“What have I ever done to deserve this perfect job position I’m in?”