As Bold & Beautiful’s Hope Changes Direction, Annika Noelle Opens Up About Switching Leading Men

Now that The Bold and the Beautiful has had Hope turn down Thomas’ proposal again (read the recap here), it would seem that “Thope” really and truly is over. In other words, Annika Noelle will once again be getting used to working with a new leading man. She’s been here before, of course, when the show broke up Hope and Liam to go all in with Hope and Thomas. And by then, she and Scott Clifton really had their system down.

“We have moments where we’ll be joking right before diving into something incredibly heavy,” she tells Soaps.com. “We could literally be joking seconds before they say “Action!” and then boom, we drop into a very heavy, very dramatic scene. 

“That’s because we work very similarly, where if it’s really heavy material, we need the levity outside of that to kind of allow us to go there,” she adds, “and we respect one another’s boundaries with that. But we always keep it professional. It’s just a testament to his talent and our ability to be complete knuckleheads and then drop into a very serious scene seconds later.”

The co-stars discovered the importance of showing each other the funny during the traumatic storyline in which Liam and Hope believed that daughter Beth had died. “After that, we both realized that for our sanity, it’s best to have a little levity outside of those heavy scenes,” Hope explains. “So we’re kind of familiar with it now and are able to drop in and out of it, and avoid taking it home with us.”

Noelle’s history of collaborating with Matthew Atkinson isn’t quite so long. However, “we’ve built a great rapport and trust,” she says. “The fun part of the story has been not knowing where this journey the writers were taking us on would go. We both kind of strapped into the roller coaster together and said, ‘Here we go!’

“It wound up being this incredible slow burn, and I give them credit, because sometimes in soaps, romance is rushed,” she continues. “This wound up being years of building up to the kiss at the Coliseum.”

What’s in store for Hope and Tanner Novlan’s Finn? That remains to be seen. But if Hope’s fantasies are any indication, they’ll be playing doctor in no time.