With Bold and the Beautiful being one of the first shows in the US to return after COVID forced a production halt, the cast and crew knew they needed to make some major changes.
“I’ve said this before, we’re like a well-oiled machine on the show,” Jacqueline MacInnes Wood who plays Steffy Forrester told 10 play during a recent Zoom interview.
“Of course there were adjustments in following protocols and, being one of the first shows to come back we knew that a lot of eyes were on us… so of course we had to do everything the best we could,” Jacqueline said.
With the entire cast and crew being regularly tested, there are also new measures in place to restrict close-contact, something that has made Steffy’s new romance with Tanner Novlan’s character Finn a difficult one to film.
Having just joined the series amid the halts and the pandemic’s spread, Tanner had a tough job of tackling a whole new world on set.
“It was my first day back! I didn’t know what to expect, it was weird!” Tanner told 10 play.
“It’s been tricky building intimacy when you’re eight-feet apart from someone and you just want to hug them or hold them and you can’t because of the restrictions and the guidelines,” he said.
“I think the way that we shot it has been done remarkably well and I think the directors and producers working all that out hasn’t affected too much onscreen, even though it feels strange to us it doesn’t look that way.”
Some viewers noticed an unconventional change when Bold returned — a change that Jacqueline has had to experience first-hand. The show began using mannequin heads so one-sided kisses could still be filmed.
“Jacqueline… has become very close to a styrofoam head,” Tanner said, laughing. Meanwhile, he had a different solution.
“I had a sit-down with my wife and said, ‘Listen, from the back you kind of look like Jacqueline so maybe would you come in and maybe we do a new thing called an intimacy double?’”
Though Tanner said she was initially unsure, his wife Kayla Ewell eventually agreed to be a stand-in so he had a real face to kiss during certain scenes. The set was also not unfamiliar to Kayla who played Caitlin Ramirez from 2004 to 2005 on Bold.
Though his time on the show has been unconventional to say the least, Tanner’s co-star raved about his time on the series.
“You have been killing it and doing such a great job,” Jacqueline told Tanner during the chat.
“Imagine being the newbie and you have all this dialogue… on top of that he’s playing a doctor and he has all this medical jargon,” she said. “So he’s dealing with all of that, talking all these really heavy subjects that we’re dealing with and on top of that it’s like this new world where we can’t be close to each other, how are we going to connect! It was a dance, especially for [Tanner].
“Now that we’re a few months in,” Jacqueline continued, “I have high hopes that we’re getting back to what we once were which is good.”
Check out more of our chat with Jacqueline and Tanner in the video above.
The Bold and the Beautiful airs weekdays at 4.30 on Network 10 and 10 play with fast-tracked episodes exclusively on 10 play
