Article from: Font size: + - Send this article: Print Email IS Ronn Moss Tourism Australia's greatest unpaid employee? It certainly seems so.
For ages the chisel-jawed actor, who has played Ridge Forrester on The Bold And The Beautiful since the show began in 1987, has pleaded with producers to take the soap Down Under. Eventually they relented.
"I've been raving about how great it is for five years now, so it probably had a little bit to do with us coming out here," Moss says in his hotel room. While he's chilling out, his colleagues are braving Sydney's fickle weather conditions by the harbour.
Production has ground to a halt while the crew waits for a shower to pass. So much for the postcard pretty city Moss had been telling them about.
The Sydney-themed episodes, which go to air on March 23 in the US and will be seen later in the year in Australia, will coincide to the day with TBATB's 20th anniversary.
Ask Moss about the appeal of Sydney as a location for the show, and he quickly falls into tourism officer mode: "You get the vibe of somewhere which is so far from the United States and does not have that European feel."
The show has filmed four times in Italy. And the main reason it chooses to go there, apart from the scenery, is that the soapie attracts 5.5 million Italians a day.
In contrast, the show averages roughly 500,000 Australian viewers a day. But by daytime viewing standards in this country, that's a hit. To put it in some sort of perspective, it's roughly double the number of people who watch Nine's Today show.
Four of TBATB's key characters are in the Sydney eps. They include Ridge (Moss), his on-again, off-again flame Brooke (Katherine Kelly Lang), his daughter Phoebe (MacKenzie Mauzy) and her older boyfriend Rick (Kyle Lowder).
Phoebe is out here to try to launch the fragrance arm of her family's company, Forrester Creations. While it might be nice to imagine the four characters bonding on their Australian sojourn, that couldn't be further from the truth.
"It's probably the antithesis of bonding," Moss chuckles. "My (character's) total motivation is to make sure Phoebe and Rick remain separated at all costs."
Yep, the meddling father. What does he have against Rick?
For a start he's much older than Phoebe, has been divorced and has lived in Europe.
"He's very experienced in ways that she isn't," Moss says.
Given Ridge's turbulent relationship history, he may not be the best one to judge, but Moss argues that Ridge is simply exerting his "fatherly influence".
Says Mauzy about the fractious interactions of the characters during their trip to Sydney: "The four of us, we try to make it better, but it doesn't work out at all.
"Phoebe and her father have been really close, but he's been really controlling. She wants to have time alone with Rick."
Moss is more than a father to Mauzy's Phoebe. He's a father figure for the actors who join the cast. Mauzy says she felt like she was on "a vacation" when she auditioned for her role in TBATB, such was the easy, breezy air of comfort Moss brought to the set.
"I remember he said to just be yourself," Mauzy says of her first time on set.
Moss, for the record, has his own, admittedly selfish, and mostly primal reason why he continues to work on the soap, and that's supporting his family.
