ROBERT NEWMAN ON Y&R HIRE

Robert Newman, best known to soap fans for playing Josh Lewis on GUIDING LIGHT on and off between 1981 and 2009, makes his Y&R debut as Ashland on February 9.

- HOWARD WISE/JPI

When the show first reached out about him assuming the role created by Richard Burgi, Newman was floored. “I had no thought of anything like that, honestly. It was just not at all on our radar — by ‘our’ I mean myself and Britt [Newman, ex-Lily, LOVING, his wife]. We’re a team; we make these kinds of decisions together.” Over the course of a weekend, “Britt and I really went back and forth on it quite a bit, but we decided that the role was really intriguing and it was worth going ahead and getting it started, and then we’ll reconsider things down the road and see how much further we want to go. At the same time, the show will be looking at me and going, ‘Well, maybe it’s time to let go of this character,’ or, ‘Maybe it’s time to move forward with this character.’ So, we’ll see what happens.”

Once he agreed to sign on Y&R’s dotted line, a cross-country whirlwind ensued for the East Coast-based Newman. “I had to do a thousand different things before I got on the plane Saturday morning,” he says. “In the meantime, they sent me five scripts to shoot on three different days my first week, like, ‘Hey, here’s a nice, easy starting week! Here you go, here’s five episodes, one on Tuesday, two on Thursday and two on Friday! Welcome to the show!’ So at the same time as I’m getting these thousand things done, I’m also tearing apart these scripts. My brain has not been sitting dormant for 12 years; I’ve been doing four-to-six plays or musicals every year that also require extensive memorization and work and preparation, but I haven’t wrapped my brain around a soap opera script in a really long time.”