JUDITH CHAPMAN ON Y&R RETURN

Judith Chapman was dining out with friends when she received the invitation to reprise the role of Y&R’s Gloria.

“Greg Salmon from the casting department called me and said, ‘Hey, how are you? What are you doing? Are you healthy?’ ” the actress recalls. “We were having this little chit chat when I said, ‘Greg, why are you calling me?’ He then said that Josh [Griffith, co-executive producer/head writer] wanted to bring Gloria back if I was available. I said, ‘Hold on a second,’ then I came back on and said, ‘Oh, my dance card is empty [laughs].’ I told him to tell Josh that I would be honored and thrilled to come back.”

The actress, who began playing Gloria in 2005, but hadn’t been in Genoa City since 2018, didn’t allow herself to get too fired up about the offer. “Believe it not, I wasn’t at all excited,” she admits. “Listen, in my half-century of working in the entertainment business, I have been down this road too many times, where something you’re hired for can just suddenly vanish. When that happens you can’t dwell on it, so that’s why I have other things to fill my life. This time, my concern was with Covid, and what if they had to pull the plug on the show again? My thought was that I will get excited when I’m actually on set. Until then, I stayed very low-key because we’re still living on a ticking time bomb and anything can happen.”