Nick Newman (Joshua Morrow) survived his shocking overdose on The Young and the Restless, leaving him in the most vulnerable place of his life.
Facing his mortal enemy, Matt Clark (Roger Howarth), coupled with his increasing fentanyl use, pushed Nick to the brink. “Nick has always been loose and confident and had a carefree attitude about a lot of things,” says Morrow. “He took some drugs to calm his nerves and to prepare for the moment, but he was not in a healthy state of mind to deal with something as dramatic as this. He just kept going further and further down this hole, and it all came to a head.”
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When Morrow first heard about Nick’s story — in which the character develops an addiction to pain medication following a car crash — from head writer Josh Griffith, he initially had reservations. “I was like, ‘I don’t know that it’s very Nick-ish, but let’s give it a whirl,’” he recalls. “I was a little nervous about it. I hadn’t been nervous about anything since high school, but I was concerned about how the fans would take it. They don’t want to see their hero fall in the way that he did, but I just ask that they take the story for what it is and enjoy the journey because from an acting standpoint, it’s been really difficult work to do, but I’ve enjoyed it, that’s for sure.”
Morrow appreciates that after more than three decades of playing the character, he’s been tasked with one of the most challenging stories of his career. “Most of the time, I come in here and do this job with my eyes closed because I don’t feel like there’s much of a stretch anymore between Nick and Joshua,” he admits. “But this is a completely different arena now and work that I’ve never really had to do, so it’s been very hard. I don’t want to make light of it. If you’ve ever Google-searched fentanyl, it’s terrifying to see what it actually does to people. That’s not quite the version that we can show on television, so I just want to be as respectful as possible and do as authentic a job as I can.”
Some of the story’s most memorable material for Morrow came in the sequences where Nick finally admitted the truth to his family — particularly Victor Newman (Eric Braeden). “It was brutal for me as an actor because all I could think about was me having to tell my own dad,” Morrow shares. “I couldn’t not cry in the rehearsal because Eric is like my father, and having to say those things to him, to see the look of disappointment on his face, it was just heartbreaking to me, and he was brilliant in the scenes.”
Revealing Nick’s addiction to his mother, Nikki Newman (Melody Thomas Scott), and sister, Victoria Newman (Amelia Heinle), presented its own obstacles. “With his mother, he needed to be reassuring to her like, ‘I’m going to beat this. I know you went through this, too. I need your help, but I’m going to do it,’” explains Morrow. “And then with his sister, that’s his best friend for life, and that he let his sister down in that regard was just devastating for him. So, I just wanted all the reveals to feel very differently. I wanted to hit the viewers differently, and I was pretty happy with the way they all turned out.”
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Filming the actual overdose pushed Morrow to a place he had never been before as an actor. “I’d find myself for the first time in an extremely long time, unsure of what I was doing,” he confides. “But I just had to drop any inhibitions I had, any guardrails that I’d put up in life, and just go for it, and hopefully, it would allow the other actors to be able to react to what they were seeing. An overdose would be freaking terrifying, I think, to see in real life. I have not seen the overdose scenes, but I know that in the moment they felt like they had a lot of weight to them, so hopefully it was an effective mechanism to this story of Nick just completely breaking down.”
In the aftermath of the overdose, Nick realizes he needs to take drastic measures. “He finally knows that he has to do something; otherwise, he’s going to die,” notes Morrow. “Nick’s always very cavalier, with this sort of swag, like, ‘I can handle anything. I don’t need help. I got this. Don’t worry.’ And for the first time in his life, he’s like, ‘I need help. I almost died in front of my son.’ And I think that is the moment that he realizes, ‘This better get fixed soon, or my children are not going to have a father anymore.’”
Howard Wise/jpistudios.com
That emotional exploration led him to filming the most demanding part of Nick’s journey. “There’s a scene coming up, an AA meeting, that was very difficult,” Morrow previews. “In fact, I told them, ‘I can’t rehearse it. This is a one-shot deal, because after it, I’m gonna have to go and sit in a dark room.’ We got it in one take.”
Ultimately, Morrow takes pride in being handed such a rich portrayal of addiction and recovery. “When Griff came to me and told me about this story, I was like, ‘You guys trust me to take a beloved character to those depths?’” he says. “I felt really honored that they entrusted me with that story and so I took it very seriously. I worked my ass off on this, and stripping Nick down to that was interesting and not very easy, but I’m proud of a lot of the scenes. I’m proud of my coworkers. It just reminds you of how incredibly talented our cast is and how honored I am to be a part of it, so I’m very appreciative that the show gave me a chance to do something like this.”
And Nick’s journey is far from over, Morrow says. “OD seems pretty rock bottom-y, but the fans will just have to stay tuned,” he teases. “There’s still more runway here to go. This isn’t going to be a quick fix for him.”
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