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Tracey Bregman Got ‘Death Threats’ When Her ‘Mean Girl’ Character Bullied Beth Maitland’s on The Young and the Restless

NEED TO KNOW

  • Tracey Bregman opened up on the Soapy podcast about playing the “mean girl” during her character Lauren Fenmore’s debut on The Young and the Restless
  • She said she received “death threats” due to a plotline where her character bullied Beth Maitland’s Traci Abbott
  • The actress explained why she never asked producers to change the plot

Sometimes playing the bad guy can get you into serious real world trouble.

Tracey Bregman, who has played Lauren Fenmore on The Young and the Restless since 1983, opened up about playing a “mean girl” opposite Beth Maitland’s Traci Abbott on the Tuesday, Aug. 26 episode of CBS’ Soapy podcast, hosted by fellow Y&R alum Greg Rikaart and The Bold and the Beautiful’s Rebecca Budig. Bregman, 62, was joined by Christian LeBlanc, who plays her on-screen husband, Michael Baldwin, on the series (Michael and Rikaart’s Kevin are brothers).

Bregman, LeBlanc and Rikaart’s Y&R characters all started out with villainous streaks before slowly becoming fan favorites, and Bregman said the path she followed as Lauren was initially a bumpy one. Budig, 53, asked if Bregman got “blacklash” during the years where Lauren bullied fan-favorite character Traci.

“Oh, yes. I did,” Bregman said. “And then having to be mean to Beth Maitland, I mean, come on.” Maitland, 67, has played Traci since 1982.

Rikaart, 48, then asked how Bregman would process the scripts when she saw how mean Lauren needed to be to Traci.

“That was very, very difficult because Beth is one of my best friends for 42 years,” she said. “And I knew, because we were so close, how she was really feeling about a lot of things.”

In one plotline, Lauren bullied Traci about being “a little overweight.”

“Then I had to say the worst things to her, and Beth will tell you that I cried more than she did over it because I could barely get it out sometimes,” Bregman said. But there were “fun times,” she added, like when they were “fighting over Don Diamont,” who played Brad Carlton, a character who was married to Traci, but also became involved with Lauren.

“We had to do a physical fight and stuff like that,” she continued. “But I will tell you, it was a double-edged sword playing the mean girl because I would get death threats and people tried to run me off the freeway.”

LeBlanc, 67, and the hosts were shocked by Bregman’s revelation. “It was bad,” she said. “There were some bad parts of it that I never really talked about, actually. I’ve never really talked about it.”

But she added that she never asked for the storyline to be changed. “I didn’t because it was also an extraordinary story for us to play as actors,” she said. 

Rikaart shared that he thinks in order to play a good “bad guy,” there has to be “vulnerability and humanity underneath the mean thing,” so he said Bregman crying over the script probably helped her bring that humanity to Lauren. 

LeBlanc’s character Michael, like Bregman’s Lauren and Rikaart’s Kevin, also started on the show as a more devious figure. He said on the podcast that he’s often asked if he’d rather play a “good guy” or “bad guy.” 

“My answer is always, I’d like to play a human person, because there’s always the one who does the bad things for a good reason, and the good things for a bad reason,” he said. “That’s the heart of it. And if you’re playing that full-bodied human being, there is a chance for redemption, because that’s part of the human condition.”

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