Michelle Stafford and Sharon Case Tease ‘Y&R’s Sharon-Phyllis Kidnapping Episode

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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the February 24 episode of The Young and the Restless.]

At the end of the Monday, February 24 episode of The Young and the Restless, longtime nemeses Sharon Newman (Sharon Case) and Phyllis Summers (Michelle Stafford) found themselves in a place they’ve never been before — kidnapped together — and their predicament will be the focus of a special episode airing on Tuesday, February 25.

For Case, who had just completed the dramatic arc of Heather Stevens’ (Vail Bloom) murder, where her beleaguered alter ego was put through the emotional wringer, it was a surprise to learn there was more in store. “Before we went on Christmas break, someone told me, ‘Oh, Michelle Stafford said that when you guys come back, you have a storyline together, something about being abducted, maybe,’” Case recalls. “And I’m like, ‘Wait what? I was just abducted. Maybe somebody misheard her.’”

“That’s so funny,” adds Stafford, “because that’s what I said when I heard that — ‘Oh, again? Sharon was just kidnapped.’”

But Sharon’s past experience will come in handy as the tale unfolds. “It’s my third or fourth abduction, and I really know the ropes now,” quips Case. “Sharon knows her way through this kind of thing. She’s sort of like, ‘You know, I’ve been here, done that, follow me. I know what I’m doing in this abduction.’”

Howard Wise/jpistudios.com

Kidding aside, the turning point comes at a fractious time in the Sharon and Phyllis relationship, where they’re still trying to work through the fact that Sharon, who thought she killed Heather — thanks to some manipulation by Ian Ward (Ray Wise) and Jordan Howard (Colleen Zenk) — let Phyllis’s son, Daniel Romalotti (Michael Graziadei), take the rap for it.

“I appreciate the story because there was nowhere for Phyllis and Sharon to go; it was the apex of their discord,” points out Stafford. “Something had to happen from that. There’s no way Phyllis is ever going to say, ‘Oh, it’s OK that you hid the bloody towels. I’m over it.’ And no way that Sharon is going to be OK with not being forgiven and just moving on. When they see each other, it would be difficult. So, I think this story that we’re doing really fixes that.”

Working so closely together over a concentrated period was something new for the actors, who have shared scenes for decades. “We were doing all of these shows together, just Sharon and me, and I said to Josh [Griffith, executive producer/head writer], ‘It’s like we’re doing our own little movie over here,’” recalls Stafford. “I think it will be very interesting for our viewers to watch because it’s nothing they’ve ever done on the show before. And we went into a very easy work rhythm. Sharon is very easy to work with.”

Even though the scenes were filmed very early in the morning. “Oh, I was really grumpy,” admits Case. “Everyone out there knows I hate being first up in the morning. And not because it’s early. It’s because you have to come up with a lot of emotion and scream and cry and it’s eight in the morning.”

“No one is going to feel sorry for us,” muses Stafford. “But hey, it’s challenging. When you get up in the morning, you’re like, ‘I need my coffee.’ Now imagine if someone said, ‘Cry right now.’”

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Timing issues aside, Case reports that the actual filming was seamless. “Everything seemed so easy and fell right into place,” she relays. “Maybe we’ve been working together for so long, but we just slid into it without questions; we didn’t even have to discuss it. It’s like we read each other’s minds, or we’re just on the same page. As storylines go, I love this one. I had a lot of fun doing it. I love working with Michelle. It was very challenging, but every day she and I got in there and we just did it. We did the impossible some days.”

Preparing for the special episode, which will exclusively feature Case and Stafford — something done only once before in May 2024 with Peter Bergman (Jack Abbott) and Melody Thomas Scott (Nikki Newman) — took a lot of work. “I actually didn’t realize it at first,” reveals Stafford. “I was going over the dialogue and was like, ‘This is a lot.’ And then I realized, ‘Oh, wait, we’re the only two in the show.’ So, I didn’t know it until a couple days beforehand. I was just memorizing it.”

Case appreciates that they broke up the shooting schedule. “They cut it into three days; it’s hard to shoot that all in one day,” she notes. “I did tell Owen [Renfroe, the director] afterwards, ‘OK, Owen, we have done this enough times now where I’m never going to call you on the weekend panicking again. I know we can do this now.’”

Howard Wise/jpistudios.com

The focus of the hour will be on the two trying to piece together where they are and who put them there. “They’re figuring out what the what the hell is going on,” previews Stafford. “I kept on trying not to get too literal about it but really imagine if you were kidnapped and put in a room and you had been drugged. You probably think the next thing is you’re going to be raped and murdered or tortured and chopped up, so I kept on being like, ‘Don’t we think we’re gonna die?’ So, we were playing that it is our last moment of life.”

Case offers, “We felt like the characters thought, ‘Maybe we are supposed to work together.’ And sometimes they feel the opposite, that this is an every-man-for-themselves situation, which is very real. Over the course of the entire storyline, we’re put in a lot of rough situations, we go through every different kind of emotion and our relationship changes over and over.”

Case shares she came up with a unique name for this new chapter. “I like to call this story ‘Asylum,’ ” Case explains. “The first one [Heather’s death] was ‘Murder.’ Everyone saw the first episode of ‘Asylum’ today, but this carries on and it does take some interesting turns and arcs. It changes the characters and propels them forward. This is really going to be fun and interesting and a great ride for the audience. When Josh Griffith writes this way, it’s a treat. You have to tune in for this one.”

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