Would Jacob Young Return to B&B? — The Actor Speaks Out! (EXCLUSIVE)
It’s been three years since Jacob Young opted not to renew his contract with THE BOLD & THE BEAUTIFUL and exited the soap as young business exec Rick Forrester. Since then, the actor has kept plenty busy with kick-butt roles on THE WALKING DEAD, HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL: THE MUSICAL — THE SERIES, The Road Home for Christmas, and his podcast, Real Conversations with Jacob Young. Still, fans of B&B often yearn for Young to reprise his soap role and for Rick to reclaim his spot in the Forrester family business. But what are the chances that that might actually happen?
Not very likely, the actor exclusively told Soaps In Depth from his new home in South Carolina. “After being on the show twice… it was a good time, working with the actors that I got to work with,” Young confessed, “but there’s just not enough work to go around.”
Young — who played Rick from 1997 to 1999 and returned to reclaim the role from 2011 until 2018 — acknowledged that B&B’s half-hour format simply doesn’t allow for the storyline wealth to be spread evenly among the cast. “They hyper-focus on a couple of storylines at a time and that just doesn’t work for me. I wanted consistency,” he shared. “It doesn’t have to be five, eight episodes a week, but just consistent. You write somebody off the canvas for a month, and then they show up one day a month. It’s not good for the character and it’s not good for the audience, in my opinion.”
The actor pointed to former B&B vixen Courtney Hope — whose Sally is now living the high life on THE YOUNG & THE RESTLESS — as a prime example of the soap sometimes lacking balance. “She got the short end of the stick with B&B,” Young mused. “She was probably single-handedly the most talented actress at that point on the show, in my opinion. She was just great. And they didn’t give her the right amount of story.”
Young has learned over the years that such ebbs and flows are the nature of the beast when it comes to daytime television. “It is what it is,” he suggested. “I’ve learned to accept that over the years.”
What we’ve learned over the years is that anything is possible when it comes to the world of soap operas. So while Young may not have any intentions of returning to B&B, we can’t help but hope that, should the opportunity arise at some point down the road, he might change his mind!
