Howard Wise/jpistudios.com
Fight For Your Right To Party: Despite his ill health, Eric (John McCook, with Jennifer Gareis as Donna) is determined to host a big soiree.
When Donna finds her beloved Eric collapsed on the floor at the Forrester mansion, she rushes to action to revive him. Once Eric regains his strength, he insists on going forward with his plans for a soiree that, given his dire diagnosis, he sees as a way to say good-bye to his loved ones in advance.
Understandably, Donna has major reservations about whether Eric is in any condition to host a big party. What is fueling Eric’s determination to charge ahead, says his portrayer, John McCook, “is wanting to put a positive spin on his life for himself. But he also wants to have everybody there and for them to stop being so concerned about him. He wants to celebrate that he won the [fashion] competition with Ridge. He wants to everyone to celebrate that with him. And subconsciously, he wants them to stop seeing what he thinks they’re seeing, which is his deterioration. And Donna is right there, by his side, understanding, but trying to talk him out of the things that she knows are going to be hard for him.” Observes McCook, “For me and for Jennifer Gareis [Donna], this is really our love story. That’s the story we’re telling at the same time. It’s been really wonderful for us to play our moments alone together and to show our own vulnerabilities to each other.”
While Eric hears Donna out as she voices her concerns, “He disagrees and he wants to do it anyway,” McCook reports. “I think she seems him stumble emotionally, and then physically, in a way that no one else has really seen, and so she really is the one who knows that this is maybe not a very good idea. But he overrides it because it’s so important to maintain his image to his whole family.”
The actor says he can relate to Eric’s reluctance to let his loved ones, even his closest kin, in on what he’s facing. “I think maybe I personally would do a little bit of that myself,” he admits. “My work is a very important part of my life, and going to Television City in Hollywood [where B&B shoots] is is one of the big joys in my life. So if I had that kind of a diagnosis and that kind of impending negativity in my health, I think I would try to walk very tall and ignore it and and rise above it while I was at work in front of the people I work with, and while I was doing my work, I would try to overcome it. I understand what Eric is doing, I really do.”
Of course, what Eric doesn’t know is that his secret health crisis is actually less of a secret than he thinks it is, with more family members in the know than he realizes. “There’s so much drama in what they’ve written, because everybody knows that Eric is sick and that he’s dying, and Eric doesn’t know that they know,” McCook points out. “And I think, especially with putting his party together, that there’s kind of a mania in Eric’s energy because he’s trying to overcompensate a little too much. [Eric is] a man who’s so in control of his life most of the time; a designer that puts out a line that gets a big reaction in the press and all over the world, he’s used to having a positive reaction to what he does. So, he continues down that road of trying to have a positive spin on everything, and I think it’s alarming to start to see a strong, in-control person start to lose control. I think it’s pretty interesting to watch.”
Mara Levinsky
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