Jill Johnson/jpistudios.com
The relationship between Bold and Beautiful‘s Poppy Nozawa and Bill Spencer was once on the (very) fast track, but has cooled considerably in the wake of the revelation that the twosome does not actually share a daughter in Poppy’s offspring, the now-incarcerated Luna Nozawa. But whether their characters are romantically linked or not, Poppy’s portrayer, Romy Park, considers herself lucky to have been paired with the actor who brings Bill to life, Don Diamont. “I think he’s exceptional,” Park smiles. “I adore him.”
Laughter Is The Best Medicine
Diamont proved to be a key source of joy for Park when she suffered a deep personal loss early in her time on the soap. “I don’t know how public it was, but two weeks after I got hired on the show, my dog passed away,” Park shares. “And Bear was my everything. I lived and breathed him. I really was his mother. And so as happy I was to be on the show, I really wasn’t laughing. I was just going there [to the studio], I was doing my part, but I was smiling kind of on the surface because I didn’t want to bring that [sorrow] into work with me. And when I worked with Don, the first day, he had me in stitches laughing. I was crying from laughter. And I ended up telling him later, ‘I thought it would be so long before I could laugh again. And you had me laughing on the first day.’ That’s how I feel about Don. I love him. He makes me laugh all the time, and it’s really such a joy to work with him.”
Diamont’s good humor isn’t the only thing Park appreciates about her co-star. “He’s phenomenal,” she declares. “He’s a veteran, and I’m learning a lot from him. He gives me really great advice. He’s very wise. He knows how it goes.”
That has definitely come in handy for the actress as she began wrapping her mind around the inner workings of soap production. She recalls, “In the very beginning, I was given two separate notes [that seemed to conflict with one another], one by the director and one by our supervising producer. And I think I must have looked really befuddled. I was thinking, ‘How am I going to play this off?’ And Don just gave me just one tip. He goes, ‘Do this.’ And [the director and supervising producer] were both happy. I won’t tell you what that thing was because that was a soap opera secret [laughs].”
Diamont has also boosted her self-confidence with his cheer-leading presence on the set. She explains, “There are some times when I’m looking at a script or a scene, and I say, ‘I really don’t understand this.’ I can be really hard on myself as an artist because I always want to bring 110 percent. And if I feel like I can’t, I will beat myself down to a pulp. And Don has been right there to just kind of pick me up and say, ‘Don’t focus on that. You’re doing a great job.’ And then he will talk me through something and will say, ‘You know, from being [at B&B for so long], I can tell you that this is the best way to go about this situation for X, Y, and Z.’ I feel like I really trust him. I really do.”
Park also appreciated Diamont’s dedication to playing the beats of their characters’ relationship, which sometimes took the form of the actors talking through their material by phone. That was a practice they employed “especially earlier on, when our scenes were getting quite heavy,” she notes. “And we would talk through character and just different things that we can bring to life.”
The actress feels that Poppy entering into a romance with a key character like Bill helped establish her on the B&B canvas. “I felt like I arrived once I knew Don Diamont was my love interest,” she says. “To me, that was such a huge, huge blessing. He’s so established, and I know he’s also a fan favorite. I was like, ‘Wow, they put me with one of the veterans of the show!’ I was really gobsmacked, and really flattered.”
