Artist-author Thom Bierdz makes a surprise return appearance on “Young and the Restless”

This is incredibly cool!

Artist and author Thom Bierdz, who I met in the fall of 2006 when I profiled him for Frontiers Magazine, returned to his soap opera roots this week with an appearance on The Young and the Restless. He played Phillip Chancellor III on the soap for three years in the late-80s.

His return was kept top-secret and I don’t know if it’s a one-shot deal.

Thom has had a very interesting life since the show – a life marked by tragedy and triumph. Thom’s chronically troubled youngest brother Troy beat their mother Phyllis to death with a baseball bat in the kitchen of the Wisconsin home where they grew up.

Things were never the same personally or professionally for Thom, who, several years later, also discovered the body of his other brother Gregg who had committed suicide. Thom’s obsession with delving into his mother’s murder and his brother’s history of mental illness not only resulted in a reconciliation with the brother who killed her, but also produced Thom’s acclaimned memoir Forgiving Troy.

Except for appearing on an episode of Matlock and returning briefly to the soap once before this latest appearance, his acting career was all but over. But his creative output had just begun. Thom became a prolific and respected artist who has made hundreds of paintings of varying mood and style.

“After my brother killed my mother, my priorities really shift,” he said in our 2006 interview. “I went really introverted and spent a lot of time examining what was really important to me. Acting became very difficult for me. I was always an introvert, and I just seemed to get more nervous as I got older. I wrote for a while and the painting happened by accident, and people were just very interested.”

Although Thom has been openly gay for many years, he was in the closet during his soap days and a heartthrob to many: “At one time there were 7,000 girls to see me in Toronto—but they weren’t there to see me,” he told me.“They were there to see my character Phillip. I knew that I was gay, and I didn’t think they were there because they knew who I was, so I never got too involved in that. I was always a little removed.”

Here is Thom’s scene from this week’s Young and the Restless with Emmy winner Jeanne Cooper who this week was once again nominated for outstanding lead actress in  a daytime drama.