Young & Restless Exclusive: On Her 37th Anniversary as Jill, Jess Walton Divulges How She Coped With Playing a Villainess ‘Everybody Already Hated’

Jess Walton is a salt-of-the-earth kinda person, a straight shooter with a warm heart and a throaty laugh. And by the time she joined The Young and the Restless in 1987, she had already amassed a mile-long list of TV credits that ranged from Gunsmoke to Marcus Welby, M.D. (with James Brolin below), from Starsky & Hutch to The Six Million Dollar Man (with Lee Majors further below). Nevertheless, tackling the role of Jill Abbott was a challenge for the future Emmy winner.

“She buried a lot of her pain,” Walton tells Soaps.com. “Jill had burned a lot of bridges with a lot of people before I came on.”

Whether the upwardly mobile manicurist was played by Brenda Dickson or Deborah Adair, the character’s specialty was finding new ways to stir the pot while losing friends and acquaintances. “Everybody already hated her so much! So I had to kind of acclimate myself to that,” Walton recalls. “To protect my own vulnerable self, which of course Jill has, with her lack of self-confidence, she just had to pretend. She had to go on the attack, you know.”

Few and far between were the Genoa City denizens who were able to look being the attitude and insults that Jill carried with her everywhere she went. “I can count on one hand the people who have looked beyond the ‘bad JIll’ and seen the person beyond. There aren’t very many, let me tell you!” Walton chuckles. “Devon has always been a dream, and years ago, Michael Corbett’s David saw the real Jill, although things didn’t turn out terribly well for him!” (Refresh your memory as to how that story ended here.)