Actress Denise Richards couldn’t be happier to return to The Bold and the Beautiful on Thursday, May 28th’s episode after a four-year hiatus from the CBS soap.
“It’s nice to be back,” Denise beamed to PEOPLE. “It feels like I never left. It’s such a great family environment, and I love my character [Shauna Fulton]. She likes to cause a little trouble.”
While it “can be very intimidating going into a set where people have worked together for so long,” that wasn’t the case for Denise. “Everyone’s just very embracing and very supportive. The actors I was working with made it so much easier to step back in.”
Believe it or not, Denise was initially turned down for a part on the show. “I tested years ago when I first started acting for General Hospital and didn’t get it,” she says. “I’d had friends on soap operas and always thought it was such a great experience, no matter what level you are at in your career.”
Later, when Denise got a call with an offer to do Bold and the Beautiful, she says she “was terrified” but “knew I had to do it.”
“I’ll never forget my very first day I had over 50 pages and all my scenes were back to back,” she says. “I had a little bit of a panic moment of, ‘How am I going to do this?'”
She was thankful to have gotten a call from Rena Sofer, who was on the show at the time. “She said, ‘I know it’s overwhelming. Don’t think of it as you have all of these pages, think of it as one scene at a time,'” she recalls. “And so I did, and somehow I was able to memorize all the pages.”
The Bold and the Beautiful airs weekdays on CBS.
