‘The Bold and the Beautiful’: The Creepy Hope Mannequin Had an Incident With Thomas Forrester’s Portrayer, Matthew Atkinson

Halloween may be long gone but Mannequin Hope is still conjuring up scares and frights on The Bold and the Beautiful. In a recent interview, one of the show’s stars, Matthew Atkinson, opened up about a situation that he had with the mannequin with the red eyes.

Thomas Forrester is in the middle of a disturbing storyline

Thomas Forrester, who Atkinson plays, is going through a mental health situation right now. He is becoming detached from reality and has been keeping a mannequin of his ex and the mother of his son, Hope Logan. Wyatt Spencer was alarmed, but people in his life like Hope and Thomas’s sister, Steffy, did not want to jump to conclusions.

Is it easier to film with the mannequin in this context?

In an interview with The TV Watercooler, Atkinson spoke again about working with the mannequin, calling it “unusual.” Because of film protocols due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, he had filmed with stand-in mannequins before in scene with actors.

“I’ll say that it’s actually a whole lot easier [than the stand-ins] because I’ve done a couple of those scenes,” he said. “I believe it was with Scott Clifton and Thorsten [Kaye]. Thorsten was supposed to basically be right here, like three feet away from me, and they had to for a couple of lines, stick a mannequin in for me to talk to because we were too close due to COVID rules. It’s very hard to talk to something that isn’t hearing you or intellectualizing what you’re saying or feeding off of you and you can’t even feed off of them. Even in short bursts. That was very difficult, to turn and talk to my dad but I’m talking to a doll and it’s not responding. It’s very weird. I had to kind of create that [back and forth] in my head.”

Atkinson said that the mannequin resembles Annika Noelle, who plays Hope, but it also doesn’t at the same time. ” You know it’s not Annika,” he explained. “It doesn’t look like Annika if you know Annika really well. But, if you look at it, you know that it’s Annika. It’s very weird. It’s enough not like her to be creepy, but enough like her to know it’s her.”

Matthew Atkinson talks about an incident he had with the Hope mannequin

The actor then dove into a story in which he said that he had an interesting encounter with the mannequin that left him shaken.

“I was walking through the stages and passed by what used to be Vinnie’s apartment set,” he said. “It was all dark because we had just gone done shooting a scene in a different area, so they had all that lit up. I was walking by that set and I’m walking to a different part of the stages and looked over and on the couch, the mannequin was there, and it scared the crap out of me! I thought Annika was sitting there, reading her lines in the dark. It was very creepy. It was not moving. I looked up and said, ‘Oh God!'”

Soon after, the actor realized that it was the mannequin and not actually his co-star. Someone had left the mannequin there after their scene. He said, “It was like a scene from a horror movie. In certain lighting, you can confuse it with Annika going around acting creepy all over the stages.”

The Bold and the Beautiful airs weekdays on CBS.