Bold & Beautiful’s Rena Sofer Shares the Challenge That She Made Lawrence Saint-Victor Face — for His Own Good
The actress knows what she’s talking about.
Quinn may have been many things over her years on The Bold and the Beautiful, but predictable was certainly never one of them — especially when it came to falling in love!
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She went from threatening Liam with sharp objects, to falling for him while holding him hostage as he suffered from amnesia. Then, somehow, out of the blue, we learned she was sleeping with Eric. What seemed like an impulsive fling turned into a lasting love and, perhaps most surprising of all, something of a redemption.
At the end of her run, they put her with Carter as the surprise pairing hooked up and fell in love. It’s something Rena Sofer opened up about on the most recent State of Mind vlog with General Hospital’s Maurice Benard (Sonny).
Being paired with Lawrence Saint-Victor was something few fans saw coming, but she makes clear, “He was great, and I loved working with him.”
He’d been on Bold & Beautiful longer than even she had, “but he was the character that was lawyer, who married people, divorced people, sued people, ran the company.”
Heck, how many viewers over the years joked that Carter was always officiating the weddings, but never got one of his own! And then, Sofer notes, “out of nowhere, they put us together,” and Carter’s non-lead status was something she understood well.
The actress got her start on Another World and Loving but was close to dropping out of the soap game until General Hospital came calling. It wasn’t a disdain for the genre, so much as being disillusioned with it.
“If you’re not that lead person,” she explains, “you just sit there and sit there and sit there! You’re just at the mercy of these writers, and that is always true, it’s always been true, and even at The Bold and the Beautiful, it’s still true.”
And up until they were put together, that seemed to be the rut that Carter had gotten stuck in. Fortunately, it’s something that she understood and knew plenty about combatting over the years.
Her success in soaps, she suggests is because, “I, for some reason, am able to create what’s not on the page.”
And that’s what she challenged Saint Victor to do.
“I sat him down in his dressing room one day,” she recalls, “and I said, ‘Listen, we can do what’s on the page, or we can create something off the page. We’ll say what they want us to say, but we can make it something deeper.’”
They’d work together like crazy to give extra depth to their scenes, from blocking to reactions to adding little flares going beyond the words they were speaking to each other. They’d run their lines, do their scenes, then start running their lines for the next day, even calling each other to figure out what was working and what wasn’t.
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Ultimately, she put it simply.
“’You’ve been here longer than I have,’” she recalls challenging him, “’and you need to show them that you’re a leading man.’ And he did. He proved it.”
See how they built their romance with our photo gallery of Quinn and Carter’s dangerous liaisons.
