Seeing the Forrester and the Trees
THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL’s John McCook (Eric) plays the patriarch of the fashionista Forrester family on daytime’s only surviving half-hour serial, and he’s not afraid to look back at the show’s beginnings or forward to where it may be headed next.
He candidly jokes, “I was too young to be Ronn Moss’ (Ridge) father. Now, he’s too old to be my son.”
So, how did he wind up playing papa to an entire clan?
“B&B had called over and over again to get me to come in and I said, ‘No,’ because I was busy. I’d been off daytime for seven or eight years and I was doing lots of episodic TV.”
However, the persistence of [B&B creator] Bill Bell, Sr. proved to be something that McCook could not resist. “My agent said, ‘Bill Bell — Bill! — wants to see you.’ I said, ‘Okay, I can’t turn Bill down. I have to go see him, because he personally called my agent.'”
Sitting down with Bell, McCook was given the basic outlines of THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL in a nutshell — an acorn that would, to his surprise, grow into a whole lot of trees.
Says the actor, “We talked and he told me all about the show and that the guy was an artist and a designer. I thought, that’s nice, he’s more like me. He’s the patriarch of the family. He told me Susan Flannery (Stephanie) was going to do it and he said, ‘If I can have you two guys, I can build the show around you with a lot of young people who may or may not have experience.'”
One such young person was Katherine Kelly Lang (Brooke). “I screen tested Katherine Kelly. She’d done some stuff on Y&R and prime time and she was very young. She was a cute little girl, maybe 21 or 22,” recalls McCook.
One question nagged at McCook, though. He was only 47 years old; how could viewers possibly buy him as the father of Ridge, Thorne, Kristen, Angela, and Felicia? Bell told him, “For the first five years, you’re going to say ‘son’ every time you’re talking to one of your kids; we have to do that anyway for new viewers.”
“He was very aware that I wasn’t old enough, but it didn’t matter, because he wanted who he wanted.”
McCook signed on and “two months into it, right away, [I knew we’d make it], because of Susan and the beauty of Ronn (Moss, Ridge) and Kelly.”
In the years since the show’s 1987 debut, it has been more than obvious that Bell and McCook’s instincts were right on the money. The Forrester fashion dynasty has expanded like wrinkle-free fabric, now including two more children for Eric — twentysomethings Rick (Justin Torkildsen) and Bridget (Ashley Jones) — and even a few grandchildren.
“We’ve finished our 17th year. The show’s evolving and changing. There’s a lot of good, new stuff and there’s some new stuff that’s not so good. I love that Linda Gray came in and Lorenzo Lamas (Hector) brings what he brings. I love Kayla Ewell (Caitlin). She’s really got potential. She’s terrific! I love Drew Tyler Bell (Thomas); he’s funny! I love Samantha (Sydney Penny). Jack Wagner (Nick) is Jack Wagner.”
“You can’t just stay in a vacuum. We’ve changed many times over the years. We’ve gone and evolved and — boom! — we come back to the Forresters and the Spectras. Now we’re coming back, but it’s the Forresters and the Marones. I love that Joe Mascolo (Massimo) is here.”
Much like a mighty oak, McCook is a force to be reckoned with.
“I’ll stand next to Susan Flannery for the rest of my life, if that’s what I need to do. I’m so happy there.”
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