‘The Bold and the Beautiful’: Will Denise Richards Return to the Role of Shauna?
The Bold and the Beautiful, CBS’ hit soap opera, first hit airwaves in 1987. This makes it America’s youngest airing daytime soap opera (in contrast, competitors like All My Children and the recently-defunct One Life to Live first premiered in the late ’60s and early ’70s).
Over the decades, The Bold and the Beautiful has racked up more than 70 Emmy Awards and aired numerous controversial characters and dramatic plot twists.
One such character, Shauna Fulton — played by Denise Richards from the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills franchise — has recently shaken things, and now fans are doubting whether they’ll see Richards return to this role or not.
Richards first appeared on ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ in 2019
Denise Richards has most recently been known for her appearances on Bravo’s reality TV programming, but she’s been acting since the early 1990s. According to IMDb, her first role that got her widespread acclaim was in 1997’s Starship Troopers.
This was followed by stints on movies like 1998’s Wild Things and 1999’s The World is Not Enough, as well as high-profile relationships with celebrities like Charlie Sheen.
Richards landed the role of Shauna Fulton back in 2019. The soap opera’s executive producer Bradley Bell described the character to People magazine as a “a fun-loving, hard-working single mother from Las Vegas who aspires to live life to its absolute fullest.”
As the mother of Flo Fulton, Richards’ character quickly get involved in her daughter’s baby-swapping plot. And that’s not the only time that Shauna Fulton shook things up in the Bold and the Beautiful universe.
Richards’ character got in-between one of the soap opera’s main couples
Ridge Forrester (currently played by Thorsten Kaye) is one of the original characters from the soap opera’s 1987 debut, and is the patriarch of the powerful Forrester family.
In the aftermath of the Flo baby storyline, Forrester helps Flo to get out of prison, and this sets the stage for Forrester and Fulton to start a relationship. There was just one problem: Forrester was married.
Fulton quickly injects herself into the drama, even going so far as to impersonate Forrester to file for divorce from his wife Brooke Logan.
The reaction from audiences to the sudden romance between Forrester and Fulton was swift, with many fans arguing that the romance was too quick and too cliched. And that dramatic storyline led to another twist.
Some fans are worried Richards will be written off the show
Richards is a busy actress with many projects on the go, and sometimes those project timelines collide. The last time that happened, Richards’ character quietly disappeared from the soap opera unannounced, only to return later.
One of Richards’ most recent projects was Glow and Darkness, which Variety describes as a Medieval period drama about “the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, while focusing on popular historical figures such as Richard the Lionheart, Leonor of Aquitaine and Pope Urban II.” And some think that may mean Richards will once again leave the show.
“With a few weeks between shooting and air dates on B&B, that indicates we should expect to see [Richards’] exit soon,” reports Soap Dirt.
The soap opera outlet hypothesizes that this time, Fulton’s fate will be decided by her ex-best friend Quinn Fuller (played by Rena Sofer). “Viewers know that Quinn and her son Wyatt both told Shauna Fulton to pack her bags and move off the Forrester property,” reports the site. “However, she stayed and blamed it on Eric [Forrester] insisting. But that sure seems shady. Plus, Shauna’s keeping a huge secret from Quinn that comes out soon. When that’s revealed, [we] predict Quinn loses it on Shauna.”
Soap Dirt predicts a “war” between the two frenemies, which will explain Richards’ absence from The Bold and the Beautiful.
However, it appears that Richards’ exit will only be temporary. Soap Dirt quotes Richards telling her cast members that she “can’t wait” to see them all again.
