Ready For Action

After A Self-Imposed Break From Show Biz, Jeff Branson Would Welcome A Daytime Comeback.

- Mara Levinsky

After dipping his toe into daytime in 2003, playing a young version of Alan Spaulding on an episode of GUIDING LIGHT, Jeff Branson made his proper soap debut in 2004 as ALL MY CHILDREN’s Jonathan Lavery, little brother to Cameron Mathison’s Ryan. With a 2005 Daytime Emmy nomination for Supporting Actor under his belt, he left the show in 2007, landing back on GL the following year as Shayne Lewis, son of Kim Zimmer and Robert Newman’s supercouple characters, Josh and Reva. That role won him the Supporting Actor Daytime Emmy in 2009, the same year the show went off the air, and in 2010, he landed on his third daytime home, Y&R, where he starred through 2012 as Ronan Malloy.

But right around the time he was wrapping up at Y&R, his life changed in a big way: he and longtime love Jaimie Foley (now Jaimie Branson, his wife) discovered that they were expecting. The pregnancy, he says, “gave me the next chapter that I desperately needed. I was at an age and at a point in my life where living for myself just wasn’t making me happy.”

His son, Van, was born on April 2, 2014. “You wait nine months for this moment, you talk about it, you romanticize it, you have all these emotions about it, and then all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘Here’s your son! Pat him on the back!’ He was on my chest before I knew what was happening. It was incredible. He looked up at me and he gave a little grin and dropped his head on my chest and fell asleep. I was like, ‘That’s my boy!’ He’s been the light of my life ever since.”