When we caught up with “The Young and the Restless’” Max Ehrich (Fenmore Baldwin) on the day he found out he’s been nominated as an Outstanding Younger Actor for this year’s Daytime Entertainment Emmy Awards, he was slightly in a daze. “I’ve been in daydream all day,” he admitted. “I feel like I was hit by an electrical current.”
But that’s a feeling that happened after his initial excitement, which began when his phone started blowing up at 6:00 a.m.! “I couldn’t go back to sleep. I was running around my apartment,” he says with a laugh. “It’s an honor, first off, just to have this job, where I get to do what I love to do for a living, and then to get recognized for my work is an amazing feeling.”
When it came to choosing which episode to submit for consideration, the actor admits it was a pretty easy choice: The New Years scene in which Fenmore told Daniel Polo’s Jamie Vernon that Hunter King’s Summer Newman was the person bullying him. “I chose that episode because that day, I felt this outer body experience. I was not in control at all,” Ehrich says. “I remember entering the scene and saying all the wrong words, [and] I was just so worked up emotionally, to a point where we had to start it over. So we started it over, and I brought it down one notch, came back in and did it. And I remember just feeling like, those are the golden moments in acting, where you’re fully not aware of yourself or anything, you’re just fully in the moment and fully not aware that you’re acting. You just are being. I wasn’t sure if I was going to pass out or whatnot. It was a very cool experience.”
But then again, receiving an Emmy nomination is also a cool experience, and it’s the latest moment when Ehrich hasn’t exactly felt fully present. “I [was at last year’s Emmys] like a month after I joined the show, and I remember thinking how crazy would it be if I was nominated, so to be nominated, it’s very cool,” he says. “It’s an honor, and it’s something I hope will hit me really soon, because it doesn’t feel real at all!”