Digest & Weekly Online always gets a kick out of talking to Matthew Ashford, who in the very flawed, very fallible Jack Deveraux has created one of the most consistently fun characters on daytime. Since returning to Salem earlier this year, Jack has concocted one half-baked scheme after the next to win back his soulmate, Jennifer—and the audience has been eating it up. "He was running away from commitment and from Jennifer for so long," Ashford muses. "But now he knows he needs her."
Digest & Weekly Online: This is the question I’ve been dying to ask you: If Jack really was gay, what would be his type?
Matt Ashford: Gosh.
Digest & Weekly Online: I know you’ve given this a lot of thought.
Ashford: Oh, yes. I guess the first thing that comes to my mind is, someone exactly like him, because he finds himself utterly interesting. I mean, we all know that that’s usually the worst type of match-up, but he’d probably immediately think of anyone who thinks he’s the best.
Digest & Weekly Online: Jennifer is far more critical of Jack than what you’ve just described.
Ashford: But see, that’s a real relationship. I mean, they have such diverging views of the world and yet at the same time, without Jennifer being there, Jack just isn’t a whole person, nothing really works or makes sense or resonates. But that’s not something that you can necessarily put into words.
Digest & Weekly Online: And certainly not anything you can plan.
Ashford: No, you can’t, but it’s the kind of thing where if she’s not there, he wonders where she is. He’s just crazy about her, and without that, his life is pretty useless. They’re in each other’s blood. The time in his life when things started working and clicking, she was there. Whether he realizes it or not. They talk a lot about their days of working together, and it was really when they were working side by side that things happened. They didn’t agree on anything, but it was exciting. They had joint goals and dreams even if they didn’t agree on how to go about it. It’s interesting now because that subject of working together and working with Vern, those were the good times. Missy [Reeves, Jennifer] and me, we say, wouldn’t it be great if we could somehow end up back in that situation? It’s funny now because we’ve had scenes where someone was complimenting Jack on some award-winning story that had been in The Spectator, and he keeps saying, "Yes, we did this," meaning him and Jennifer. But I laugh because I know that Jack had fought the story every step of the way; he was always calling Jennifer a bleeding-heart liberal and so forth. But after it got positive recognition, he was happy to take credit.
Digest & Weekly Online: Well, it’s very Jack for him to enjoy the part where the credit comes in, and not so much the legwork.
Ashford: Absolutely. And he’d have been the first to say I told you so if it hadn’t worked out.
Digest & Weekly Online: The story that’s going on now really reminds me of the manic energy that existed during Jack and Jennifer’s original courtship.
Ashford: Well, he’s definitely pulling stuff out of the back of his head, or wherever he’s pulling it from! He’s jumping into this plan and then that plan. Sometimes he’s just creating an environment where he hopes that something positive will come out of it. It surprised me when Jack proposed to Jennifer. I just felt like the timing wasn’t right, but he just leapt. It’s the same thing now; he’s just created such a difficult situation with Jennifer and now with Greta, between these two women who have said, "Hey, you better be telling me the truth, or else." And of course, he’s not. I have no idea how it’s going to turn out. It’s really a mystery to me. The more he tries to control the situation, the more it slips away. But he thinks that in the end, when it all works out, Jennifer will understand.
Digest & Weekly Online: Jack just doesn’t seem like Jack unless he’s doing the difficult thing.
Ashford: Well, he didn’t think it would be difficult! It didn’t seem difficult at the time he cooked it up. The difference is that usually he’d be using someone like the character of Vern Scofield to help him carry stuff out. I mean, what is a sidekick? Someone at your side who you can kick when things aren’t going well, and blame for the mistakes that you’re making. Jack is trying to use Greta in that capacity, but it’s little harder with her than it was with Vern.
Digest & Weekly Online: I loved the dynamic Jack had with Vern, who was someone who kind of shook his head at Jack and helped clean up his messes.
Ashford: The actor who played Vern, Wayne Heffley, we have continued our friendship, and he’s done 600 films, but he says that his time on Days was some of the most enjoyable days he’s ever had. He loved it; he’s always hoping that they’ll say, "Hey, let’s start up The Spectator again!" You never know.
Digest & Weekly Online: The environment of the newspaper, as we were saying, really highlighted the differences between Jack and Jennifer, but also how those differences were complementary and somehow worked together.
Ashford: Well, we also were coming out two very different storylines. Missy had just come from this teen story and suddenly was like a young working woman, and I was in a story with Steve and Kayla where I was basically a [villain] and I couldn’t really be in any sort of romantic story. So they wrote scenes about work, about these issues that we could kind of sink our teeth into and fight about, without having to push a relationship, so the relationship developed more naturally. That happens in life: people working side by side in an office, they sometimes look at each other and they like what they see. And that’s another thing about it: it happened in such a natural, not pushed way, which I think really helped.
Digest & Weekly Online: I’ve said this to you before, but I think Jack and Jennifer are one of the great accidents of chemistry in the history of daytime.
Ashford: From what they told me, they didn’t plan it. I was just out there kind of dangling in the wind, and they were moving Missy out of the young storyline, so they put her at the newspaper. At the time, Jack had sworn off women and commitment and just wanted to work and be good at something, and that’s what I played. He was trying to find his value in work. I used for my image Citizen Kane, those early scenes where Kane takes over a small newspaper and says, "This paper isn’t very big, but it’s got a lot of heart, and we’re going to become the number one paper in this area." That was my idea of it, and into that, they kind of dropped Missy and the character of Jennifer, and it was really fun. For those reasons, when they added the romance in the workplace, I think it worked on a broader and more resonant level.
Digest & Weekly Online: Jack took over The Spectator from Diana Colville, right?
Ashford: Yep, she controlled it and then Jack somehow cobbled together 51% and snuck it out from under her, and so it began. But then Victor Kiriakis bought it out from me! I mean, he did the same thing to Jack. I had a scene not too long ago at the Brady Pub or wherever, and there was John Aniston. I thought, "Man, I haven’t seen him since he bought me out!"
Digest & Weekly Online: I could see Jack getting back into the newspaper business to woo Jen.
Ashford: Oh, I think it would be fun, especially if it was imposed from the outside, if someone said, "You can have the paper, but only if she’s part of it." Especially if we’re still fighting, that would make for great stuff. Right now we’re in the same house and we’ve agreed to try to live as a family if not as a couple, but if you added the work thing… Missy and I both think that would be a lot of fun. At least that would answer the question of what we’re living off of!
Digest & Weekly Online: Yeah, how exactly is Jack making ends meet these days?
Ashford: I don’t really know, unless he’s borrowing money from Greta — which I tend to think he is. Jennifer’s got a trust fund from Grandma that we’re going through. And that’s OK, too. Hope’s got a trust fund. There are a lot of trust-fund babies in this town!
Digest & Weekly Online: Well, I look forward to seeing the mistakes Jack will inevitably make next.
Ashford: And he will, too. Jack is someone who’s seeking his happiness, but doesn’t know quite how to find it. As whacked out and as negative as he seems, he’s living on hope. He’s in denial about all sorts of things, but if he actually started thinking about it, he’d lose his mind. He’d run screaming from the room. Jack is very much like Scarlett O’Hara; he’s always thinking about tomorrow.