The Supporting Actor and Actress categories are often the most competitive categories of the night. Don't believe it? Look at some of the heavy storylines submitted by this year's nominees: a paternity battle, a man learning that the child he thought was his really wasn't, and a man who felt unseen and decided to send his supposed best friend to jail for murder.
For Jeff Kober, who is well known to fans outside of daytime for roles on China Beach, Sons of Anarchy, and The Walking Dead, playing crime boss Cyrus Renault was something of a revelation. Kober spoke of the differences between primetime and daytime, with the most notable difference being the number of takes an actor might get to get a scene just right.
"Well, the difference between daytime and nighttime is you have one take, and you don't really have a rehearsal, and you do it one time. On nighttime, you rehearse and rehearse then you do it from this angle and this angle and this angle, and you build a performance and you trust the editors to make it look good," Kober explained. "With this, you've just got to know all your words and let yourself go and hope for the best, and if you're going to crash, you'll crash big. So, I just, I made it my own by not letting myself be small."
While the once-and-done format can be daunting for some actors not familiar with the pace of daytime, Kober has come to embrace it. "[Y]ou have to trust your instincts and trust the moment and trust your partner. The fact is, every partner that I've had there, when I go in on them, they come back on me, so, it's a win for all of us."
Two of those partners -- multi-soap vets and Emmy winners Genie Francis (Laura Collins) and Michael E. Knight (Martin Grey) -- earned high praise from Kober.
"With Genie, she's just so open and available, and as far as you want to go, she'll go there with you and match you step for step and let herself be real and alive in the moment, and that's fantastic," Kober said. "And Michael has been a friend for a very long time, so to give him shit on camera is fantastic!"
What fans might not have known was that General Hospital is not the actor's first daytime role. "I was a bartender on The Young and the Restless, it was one of my first gigs, so, there's that," Kober revealed.
"I mean, I'm humbled and honored to get this because I didn't know how to do this work, and I had to learn on the fly, and they let me do it the way I wanted to do it, and it was fun -- and it continues to be fun. I really enjoy working in this genre," Kober said.
This was Kober's second consecutive nomination in the Supporting Actor category. Now that he has an Emmy, Kober was asked the age-old question: Where are you going to put your Emmy. While he wasn't exactly sure where it would go, Kober did muse that he was "going to put it in every Zoom call" that he has.
With this win, General Hospital has won 14 times in the Supporting Actor category, with five of those wins coming since 2015. The ABC soap won the very first trophy in this category back in 1979 when Peter Hansen (Lee Baldwin) took home the award.
A mom with a murderous past. A woman dealing with the sudden death of husband. A celebration of a character's stories past. Classic breaking up and making up. A woman learning that she had an incurable disease and witnessing the death of a man that she might have loved. While they could have been topics on a talk show during Sweeps months, those were just some of the themes touched on by this year's Outstanding Actress nominees.
Kelly Thiebaud made her General Hospital debut nearly a decade ago. Despite her alter ego having many memorable moments -- she tossed a young girl's doll in a fire -- and getting its own nickname: the Britch -- this marked Thiebaud's very first Daytime Emmy nomination, a nomination that brought home Emmy gold.
"I have no idea what to say. I cannot believe this. To have my work recognized like this... it's just so meaningful," Thiebaud said when she took the stage to collect her Emmy. But it would seem that not everyone thought her work was worthy of recognition.
"My brother, when I first started acting, saw my work and was like, 'You're not that good.' Thank you for giving me something to rub in his face," Thiebaud said with a laugh.
About 15 minutes later when the actress made her way to the press room backstage, Thiebaud said that she had not yet heard from her brother, but was sure he was "really going to laugh."
"We were FaceTiming [Thursday night], and I was asking him, like, 'What should I say in my speech? I have no idea,' and I said, 'Oh, I should actually say about how you told me that I'm not a good actress.'" Thiebaud shared. "And he laughed, so he'll think it's really funny."
Speaking of her character's diagnosis with Huntington disease -- a fatal genetic disorder that causes the progressive breakdown of nerve cells in the brain -- Thiebaud said that she was "honored" to get to tell a little bit about the disease through her work on General Hospital.
"I had no plans to be an actor when I first moved out to Los Angeles," Thiebaud said. "I had no idea. I was modeling at the time. I moved here when I was 17, and I'm from a really small town, so I honestly had no clue -- I just wanted to get out of my small town, and I had an opportunity, and I took it, and I told myself I was just going to figure things out, and I guess I did!"
General Hospital actresses have won this award three times in the past four years.
