Chatting up Y&R star Thom Bierdz!

It was three years ago this month that I first met Thom Bierdz.

I was assigned to write a story on him for Frontiers magazine (no Frontiers IN LA) and went to his home that was just walking distance from my pad in Park LaBrea. I was suffering from allergies so bad it was comical and between sniffles, I listened to Thom’s life story that was far more riveting than anything on television.

Thom first gained fame in the mid-80s as Philip Chancellor III on the CBS soap The Young and the Restless, a role that he returned to earlier this year after a 20 year hiatus.

After Thom left the show in 1989 to pursue movies, the worst kind of tragedy struck: Back home in Wisconsin, Thom’s chronically troubled youngest brother Troy beat their mother Phyllis to death with a baseball bat in the kitchen of the home where they grew up. Things were never the same personally or professionally for Bierdz, who, nine years ago, also discovered the body of his other brother Gregg who had committed suicide.

Trying to make sense of it all, Thom threw himself into painting and has become a very successful artist. He also wrote a harrowing memoir about his family called Forgiving Troy.

He had not done much acting in between his stints on the soap and during his first go-round, he was still in the closet. But now, not only is Thom out and proud, so is his character of Phillip.

I saw Thom recently at the Screen Actors Guild where he was in the audience for a panel discussion on being out in Hollywood. He got a warm reception when the moderator told the crowd that he was in the audience. We chatted a bit before the event began and I wondered what it was like for him to return to The Young and the Restless after two decades.

“It’s so cool that everybody on the set in every capacity has been very nice and supportive to me,” Thom said. “It’s not like I would have expected something else but I didn’t know. One of the prop guys told me the other day, ‘You know, we got the ‘There’s gonna be a gay character speech.’ And they did. They were told this is a serious thing and let’s not joke about this. So that was cool.”

So, is acting like riding a bike?

“I don’t know, I still don’t feel like I’m doing my best yet,” he said. “I’ve got some scenes this week that will air in [three] weeks that I could be emotional. But here’s the thing. A lot of the guys my age on the show, they don’t cry a lot so I don’t think that I have to. But 20 years ago, I would have definitely done that. The truth is, 20 years later, I’m not as vulnerable as I used to be. Very little really upsets me at this point.”

Thom has been through a lot and I admire and appreciate how honest and open he’s been about it all. Here’s hoping his soap alter-ego gets a juicy storyline that involves a love interest! Hey, it’s working over at One Live to Live!