The Top 10 Celebrity Guest Appearances on ‘The Young and the Restless’

As a huge Star Trek fan, what better place to start than with George Takei! Heck, I could do a whole ‘top 10 George Takei appearances outside of Star Trek‘ list. This was a fun appearance for Sulu as he was the person in charge of Neil and Drucilla’s wedding.

This happened back in 2003. The thing with a guest appearance like this is, even if you’re not super familiar with Star Trek, you at the very least know who George Takei is. Even if when you first see him you’re not quite sure, as soon as he speaks you realize there’s something familiar!

Next up on this top 10 celebrity appearances on The Young and the Restless, we have a very talented young woman whose star is still well and truly rising: Mckenna Grace. As a child actor, she was so much fun in the Disney series Crash and Burnstein. However, in The Young and the Restless, Mckenna Grace would play the role of Faith Newman.

What is interesting about this is that she would actually be the third (well technically fourth if you count the twins who originally played Faith as two separate actors) to play this role and she would do it for two years. Mckenna Grace has just gone from strength to strength with roles in movies such as Gifted, Annabelle Comes Home, and the two most recent Ghostbusters movies.

If you don’t recognize the name David Faustino, I am certain you will recognize the name Bud Bundy! While he is best known for his work as the younger Bundy sibling in Married… with Children, David Faustino would get steady work all through the 80s, 90s, and even now.

In 2017 he was part of The Young and the Restless for a few episodes where he played the role of a TV producer called Howard Green. Look, the role may not have been all that super memorable, but the fact that we have an 80s and 90s sitcom legend like Bud Bundy on this list is pretty awesome!

No matter if you love him as Machete or as the guy trying to sell you Old El Paso, Danny Trejo is one of the most recognizable bad guys of all time. He has appeared in all kinds of shows and movies over the years, usually playing a tough guy or some kind of villain.

He was such a fun guest star that I felt he had to make this top ten 10 celebrity appearances on The Young and the Restless list. He does an excellent job playing the role of a bartender in Mexico. If you have never seen his guest appearance, close your eyes and imagine what Danny Trejo would be like on The Young and the Restless and that is pretty much exactly what you get!

Next up we have a really fun one, and that is a pre-epic-80s-mustache Tom Selleck playing the role of Jed Andrews! Selleck would play Jed between 1974 and 1975, and it was one of his bigger earlier roles.

Now, what makes Tom Selleck playing Jed Andrews so much fun is that in 2005, 30 years after he played the first role, he would return to The Young and the Restless to reprise his role! How awesome is that? Tom Selleck is one of those icons that is just impossible not to love, and the fact he does stuff like this is a huge reason as to why. I wonder if there was anyone who watched back in the mid-70s who remembered Tom Selleck playing Jed when he showed up in 2005?

To show you that I could be your hero, I made sure to have Enrique Iglesias pretty high on this top 10 celebrity appearances on The Young and the Restless list. Terrible puns aside, this is such a fun guest appearance for a massive star! What is fun about this guest role is that he was actually playing himself as he performed his song “Somebody’s Me”, which was used to promote his album, Insomniac.

Paul Walker is an actor that we lost far too soon. He was handsome and tough and he was a legitimately talented actor who could do a bit of everything. Not many people realize that Paul Walker was in a ton of stuff in the 80s and 90s, and one of his most memorable 90s roles was that of Brandon Collins on The Young and the Restless. Now, this was not just a little one or two episode appearance. Brandon would actually be part of the show from 1991 until 1992, appearing in 14 episodes along the way.

Ok, you are going to have to hear me out on this one -calling Eva Longoria a “guest star” on The Young and the Restless may seem a bit of a stretch because she played Isabella Brana in what is classed as a recurring role.

However, why I feel she deserves to be so high on this list is that she played this role in the early 2000s. Do you know what role she would get off the back of this? Gabrielle Sollis in Desperate Housewives and that is the show that really made her become an A-list star! Now, this is just my opinion, but without The Young and the Restless, Eva Longoria does not get Desperate Housewives, and perhaps without that she does not become the big star that she is!

I wanted to have a true “guest star” high up on this top 10 celebrity appearances on The Young and the Restless list and I decided to go for an absolute global megastar! While Katy Perry is a household name today thanks to her string of hits, in 2007 she appeared on The Young and the Restless before her breakout album, One of the Boys. Now, I can’t say that her appearance on The Young and the Restless was what caused her career to skyrocket later in that year… but at the same time, we can’t fully rule it out either, can we?

How can you top The Hoff? Trick question – you can’t! David Hasselhoff actually had a main role on The Young and the Restless, playing “Snapper” Foster from 1975 until 1982, replacing William Espy who quit the role. David Hasselhoff would leave his role as Snapper for Knight Rider, which is what catapulted him to the icon that he is today.

David Hasselhoff leaving the show is said to be one of the main reasons that the show would move directions and not focus on The Foster family. However, what made him the number one pick for this list was that he would actually return to the role of Snapper for a few episodes in 2010! If you want an extra bit of trivia, a few years before David Hasselhoff would come back in a guest role to play Snapper, the original actor, William Espy, would also reprise his role as Snapper for a few episodes in 2003.