On The Young and the Restless, Phyllis Summers has been single for ages, but the new man in her life comes with more than a little baggage: It’s Matt Clark, the mortal enemy of her ex-husband, Nick Newman, who is looking for redemption after a bout of amnesia made him reconsider his psychotic ways. Head Writer Josh Griffith spoke exclusively to Soap Opera Digest about why he’s so excited about pairing actors Michelle Stafford and Roger Howarth on the show.
Matt and Phyllis as ‘Kindred Spirits’
As Griffith sees it, the reason to bring Matt into Phyllis’ romantic orbit is simple. “It just can’t get more delicious,” he says.
Phyllis’ own troubled history gives her common ground with her new suitor. “Phyllis has never done anything that is near the level of monstrosity of what Matt has,” Griffith notes. “But she’s someone who is constantly seen as the pariah, constantly pushed to the side, constantly fought against. And she has repeatedly had to try to prove herself,” as Matt is currently doing as he navigates a rocky reentry into Genoa City society.
“Phyllis was never a victim of Matt’s horrors,” Griffith points out. “And in Matt, she’s seeing someone who wants to change, who wants to be redeemed and who wants forgiveness. And in an odd way, they’re kind of kindred spirits in that aspect.”
A Proven Formula
It’s a dynamic that is likely to strike longtime watchers of Howarth’s daytime work as familiar. On One Life to Live, where Griffith served as co-head writer in the mid-1990s, Howarth’s Todd Manning was very much the town pariah when he struck up a friendship with Blair Cramer (Kassie DePaiva), who was herself an outsider longing for respectability. The pals, who dubbed themselves the founding members of Llanview’s “Most Pathetic” Club, eventually fell in love and married multiple times. “We mined that at One Life as much as we could and it was gold,” Griffith says. “It just works so well, and I think we have a similar dynamic here [at Y&R] with Matt and Phyllis, in that it is unexpected, but at the same time feels almost inevitable.”
In the mid-2010s, General Hospital‘s writers used a similar formula in pairing Howarth, who was then playing Franco Baldwin, with Nina Reeves, the character played by Stafford from 2014-19. Franco was a notorious serial killer who’d become kinder and gentler since the removal of a brain tumor, but faced an uphill battle in convincing those he had wronged that he was a changed man, while Nina earned her own fair share of naysayers after inducing Ava Jerome’s (Maura West) early labor, delivering her daughter, Avery, and fleeing to Canada with the newborn. Her good pal, Franco, tagged along. They wound up in a mental institution, where they shared their first kiss.
While Nina and Franco eventually went their separate ways, Howarth and Stafford have both spoken glowingly about their experience working together, and Griffith is equally enthusiastic about the on-screen results when the two Daytime Emmy winners share scenes. “When I see them together, it’s inspirational,” he declares. “I go, ‘This is gold right here!’ The thing about them is that both the characters and the actors are so unpredictable. The way Roger works, the way Michelle works — not just in terms of story, but with their dynamic in a scene, you never know how they’re going to interpret it and where they’re going to take it, and it’s always riveting.”
