Soap Stars Look Back

Christine Bennett Lind was just shy of her first anniversary as Bianca Montgomery on All My Children when ABC announced the 41-year-old soap was ending. “It was devastating,” she said. “That’s a big word in the kind of world we live now, but I was so sad. This has been such an opportunity and has had such a huge impact, so to hear that was scary.”

Lind joined the cast in 2010 as a replacement for Eden Riegel, who played Bianca, Erica Kane’s lesbian daughter. Bianca became daytime TV’s most iconic gay character after she came out to her mother in a 2000 episode.

“I remember I was on the subway telling my parents that I was going to test to be Susan’s daughter and the look on their faces was ‘Yeah, right,’” Lind said. “It was surreal, not just because of who Susan Lucci is, but also because I knew the significance of this character.”

Lind’s first press interview when she joined All My Children was with The Advocate, which, for Lind, crystallized the impact of the role she had taken on. In 2009, Bianca married Reese (Tamara Braun) in daytime TV’s first gay wedding. A year later, the couple had the genre’s first gay divorce.

“I suddenly felt I was really diving into something,” Lind said about the weight of her role. “I was nervous about it. I am heterosexual, but have a lot of gay friends and I felt [like], ‘I really have to take this on.’ It didn’t feel like a burden. I always felt like, ‘What an opportunity I have’—not to change the world necessarily with a TV show, but to be authentic and genuine and as human as I could.”

The young actress said she would be “honored” to continue playing Bianca in an online version of the soap.

“The impact it’s had on me, playing a role with a social significance, has been huge and it’s made me feel great to go to work every day and represent people who don’t feel they’re represented,” Lind said. “And I’ll do that for the rest of my career if I can.”