After being told he would only be “sprinkled in” to episodes of The Bold and the Beautiful earlier this year, Scott Clifton found out Liam would be back at the forefront on the long-running soap — with a terminal brain tumor.
Clifton, 40, opened up about his conversation with head writer Bradley Bell about his initial step back and current story line in an interview with Soap Opera Digest on Thursday, April 24, revealing he had been “worried” for the last decade about Liam’s love triangle story line with Steffy (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood) and Hope (Annika Noelle).
“That was something that I had worried about for at least the last decade. Like, there’s no way this is sustainable, right? This guy [is] just going back and forth between these two women, never learning his lesson and becoming more and more unlikable to the point where you can’t just say, ‘Oh, his heart was in the right place,’” Clifton said. “At a certain point, you can’t even say that anymore about the character! I got exactly where Brad was coming from.”
The actor, who joined B&B in 2010, “didn’t work very much at all for a while” and then “out of nowhere” got the script about Liam’s health scare.
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“I’m really, really excited to tell this story, because I’ve never been entrusted with something this weighty before. And I’m really grateful to Brad for having enough faith in me to pull this off,” he said before teasing the direction of the story. “We do, like, a boot camp hell week version of the stages of grief. Liam just sort of runs through them all in a matter of several scenes, but I think there are a couple of different flavors for Liam [as he processes his dire diagnosis]. There’s a big chunk of this where Liam is just in denial. Steffy and Finn are trying to get him to wrap his head around this, and he’s not getting it — like, he’s really not getting it — and that was really fun to play.”
Clifton said Liam’s emotions will be all over the place.
“I don’t know if it’s anger, but he starts to get a little sharp, you know? And it was fun to kind of go through these different ways of coping, but in a really concentrated, short amount of time,” he said. “I had a lot of fun on that roller-coaster. And yes, eventually he does accept it — and what his attitude is when he accepts it is interesting, and that kind of sets the stage for the rest of [the] story.”
In a separate interview with TV Insider, Clifton said he’s been “really self-conscious” about acting this story line.
“I was so convinced that I totally blew it or overplayed it or maybe I downplayed it too much, or maybe it would be more painful than I made it look, and I’m constantly trying to find that balance,” he said. “I really like a scary challenge, and I really like trying to figure out how to imagine being in a position that I’ve maybe never been in. Jacqui is so easy breezy for me to work with, because we work almost identically.”
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While he was complimentary of Wood, fans of Steffy and Finn (Tanner Novlan) shouldn’t be too worried, as Clifton claims Liam is not desperate “to hook up” with his ex.
“Liam’s not trying to get Steffy back or to intervene in her relationship with Finn. It’s none of that,” he said. “They’re really good coparents, and they’re really good friends, and they care about each other, and I think that’s all really cool.”
The Bold and the Beautiful airs on CBS weekdays at 1:30 p.m. ET.
