Howard Wise/jpistudios.com
If At First You Don’t Succeed: Is B&B positioning Katie (Heather Tom) and Bill (Don Diamont) to try, try again?
As viewers of Bold and Beautiful know, Katie’s ears perked quite a bit when she first learned of the possibility that Bill sired Luna, leading fans to wonder if the show might rekindle the Bill/Katie relationship. The duo was previously married twice and share a son, Will. (For a look back at how Katie figures into Bill’s romantic history, click here.)
Don Diamont, Bill’s portrayer, teases, “Yeah, yeah, she’ll come crawling back now, won’t she! Oh, now somebody new is in Bill’s life and Katie is feeling that, isn’t she!” All jokes aside, the actor would welcome a new chapter to the saga of Bill and his ex. “The Bill/Katie relationship is just so beautiful for me and I think Heather [Tom, Katie] would say the same,” he offers. “Yes, there has been everything with Brooke [that threw a monkey wrench into the couple’s relationship], but ultimately, he sees Katie as his, no matter what goes on. He sees it that way, and if you want to call it a possessiveness, I think that’s fair, especially given Bill’s personality. And I think that Katie feels the same, even though he hasn’t always been that great for her and he’s done some dastardly things. Ultimately, Bill is her great love.”
Which is not to say that Diamont thinks that being in a committed relationship with Bill was easy for Katie in the past, or would be without obstacles in the future. “She knew who she was marrying and the challenges that would come with that. You can know that, but living with it is a different thing, right?” he notes. “You can know, or think you know, who you’re marrying, but then actually having to live with that over time will create challenges greater than maybe you thought there would be, and that certainly has proven to be true [for them], and cause them to come apart at the seams. And Bill owns a lot of that — most of that — for sure.”
Diamont thinks it’s possible that Bill might be looking for redemption in a number of areas in his life now that he’s grappling with the discovery that Luna is his daughter. “[The Bill/Katie relationship] also plays into righting wrongs,” he asserts. “With that Katie dynamic, he knows what really has been best for him in his life and that he has screwed it up. It’s probably better to ask Heather [Tom, Katie], but I think it’s fair to say that when Bill had nobody in his life, and he kept trying to get Katie to give him another chance and kept trying to get Katie to take him back and she was just shutting him down, that was easier for her to do when she wasn’t threatened, in any way. There wasn’t somebody else that Bill’s heart was being taken by” — whereas now, his relationship with Poppy, Luna’s mother, is deepening by the day.
Of course, Katie has not been celibate since her last go-round with Bill, and most recently got together with Carter. “I don’t think Bill was particularly feeling threatened by Carter even though she was seeing him,” Diamont opines. “It was more just [the sting of] Katie’s rejection, having nothing to do with Carter. I think that regardless of that relationship, Katie was going to take the same position [about not reconciling with Bill the last time he pitched the idea]. Even though she’s vulnerable to Bill, she had just been so hurt. So that takes some time to get past. But once someone comes into Bill’s life who he has a daughter with, that’s definitely going to threaten Katie and I think also awaken some things in her that she has been able to sort of literally keep at bay — compartmentalize, lock those feelings away. But they’re there. They can’t not be there. She’s his great love, he’s her great love. And so I look forward to seeing how that unfolds in the coming weeks and years.”
No matter what the future holds for Bill and Katie, Diamont cherishes the opportunity to share the stage with Heather Tom. “I can say this unequivocally: working opposite Heather Tom has been the greatest joy of my professional life,” the actor declares. “And that says a lot when you consider that I work with [Katherine] Kelly [Lang, Brooke] and I work with Scott [Clifton, Liam] and Darin [Brooks, Wyatt]. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, people, actors, talents. Heather is just my great joy. We’ve known each other since she started [on Young and Restless as Victoria in 1991; at the time, Diamont was on Y&R as Brad], something like 35 years. This goes all the way back to watching her on Y&R, watching her first time on Y&R, watching this extraordinary talent as such a young girl. And then they flirted with putting us together when we were on Y&R but never really did anything with that, but we always just liked each other, and then when I came to B&B, Heather told me that when she heard that I was coming to B&B, she immediately emailed Brad [Bell, executive producer/head writer] and said, ‘I want Don Diamont!’ So, that, for me, is the greatest flattery of my acting career, that Heather Tom wanted to work opposite me.”
