Jasmine Burke has a Daytime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Performance in a Daytime Drama Series for playing June on Beyond the Gates, adding another spotlight to a show that has already collected 15 Daytime Emmys nominations. The recognition lands at a moment when the soap is being watched not just as a new series, but as a rare daytime drama built around a Black family.
That is not how Burke expected her time on the show to unfold. She said she never knows when June will show up again, because she is not a contract player and scripts arrive unpredictably. "I just receive scripts out the blue," she said. "I'm not a contract player, so I could receive a script or I could not." Even so, she said she is grateful each time the production reaches out: "The fact that they've continued to write me in, I'm just grateful every time I receive that email."
For Burke, the nomination is a surprise rooted in a show she thought would matter long before awards voters noticed. She said that when she first read about Beyond the Gates years ago, she believed it would connect because daytime audiences were hungry for stories like this. The series has been described as the second soap to feature a Black cast since Generations debuted in 1989 and ended in 1991, and as the first soap built completely around a Black family. It is also the first new daytime soap to launch on a major broadcast network since 1999.
That background makes Burke’s nod part of a larger turn for the series. She said she came into the role without awards expectations, which makes the show’s 15 Daytime Emmys nominations stand out even more. In other words, a part-time character with no guaranteed screen time has become one of the faces of a first-year soap that is already forcing daytime to make room for stories it had long left out.
Burke’s path to that moment was not the easy one she was told to expect. Gold Derby said the Atlanta native sang backup for artists like CeeLo Green and appeared on MTV’s Making the Band competition series. She also said she was repeatedly told she had to move to New York or L.A. to make it in entertainment, a view she never accepted. She said she believed God gave her a talent and would make sure it reached the world somehow. For now, that belief has taken her from occasional scripts to a Daytime Emmy nomination, with June’s next appearance still left to chance.
