Everything You Need To Know About Heather Tom Making Daytime Television History On ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’

In honor of her 35th anniversary in daytime, actress Heather Tom is set to make daytime television history as she wrote, directed and acted in the Thursday, March 27 episode of “The Bold and the Beautiful,” which is timed to Women’s History Month.

“I was really kind of surprised this hadn’t happened before… really there’s like a handful of women who have done it across all television platforms, and so, I’m really proud to, like, kind of join the ranks of those, like, two or three other women [chuckling],” says Tom, who plays Katie Logan on the soap, in an on set interview with “Entertainment Tonight.” “It’s never been done on daytime, obviously. ‘Cause I think, you know, if you know how we work, it’s very hard to, like, direct while you’re in a scene. Because we cut all of our shots in the booth, and so, I kind of have, you know, my shadow person in the booth [laughs].”

The idea for the episode, which features an all-female cast, came from executive producer and head writer Bradley Bell, who wanted to celebrate one of his leading ladies and her contribution not only to the show but to the industry as a whole.

Joining the show’s cast in August 2007, Tom previously portrayed the roles of Victoria Newman on “The Young and the Restless” and Kelly Cramer on “One Life to Live,” among her other acting credits. Meanwhile, Tom has been a director at “The Bold and the Beautiful” since November 2015, with her first episode airing January 5, 2016, and last fall, it was announced that in addition to her acting and directing work at soap, Tom had also joined the show’s writing team as a scriptwriter, with her first episode airing Wednesday, November 6, 2024.

Speaking with Soap Opera Digest, Tom shared that the plot for the episode came about from a conversation she had with Bell, telling the outlet, “We talked about what we wanted the show to be. I think we both knew that we wanted it to be all female actors and centered around our lovely, wonderful, beautiful ladies and so we decided, ‘Let’s make it about mothers and daughters.’ And then it was about figuring out how we were going to actually have me act in a scene and direct at the same time, because, with daytime, we have multiple cameras and so as a director, you go through your script and your scenes and you map out all of your shots.

“You know how you want the camera to move and you know what shots you want and it all moves very kind of seamlessly, but fast, because you’re sitting in the booth and you’re [she snaps her fingers] snapping between the different characters or cameras — and that becomes very hard to do when you’re actually also in the scene. As it turns out, you actually can’t be in two places at once. But we came as close to that as possible.”

While making history was definitely something on her mind throughout the day as she pulled triple duty during the mid-February taping, Tom revealed her biggest concern was a dramatic scene involving herself and co-stars Katherine Kelly Lang (Brooke Logan) and Annika Noelle (Hope Logan), who play mother and daughter on the soap.

“I wanted to make sure that those scenes were well-rehearsed, that we rehearsed them multiple times if we needed to. I didn’t want there to be any doubt in anyone’s minds — especially the actors’ minds — that whatever work they did was not going to be captured somehow. I did not want them to worry about the technical [aspect of things] or the logistics; I didn’t want the technical to get involved in the way of the emotional,” said Tom, recalling the experience. “My biggest concern was making sure that everyone felt confident to work, and on those scenes in particular. And then my other concern was that we live in a world, in a genre, where we don’t have any time, and we have to make our day [i.e., complete all the scenes scheduled to be shot that day]. I did not want this to be [a situation where people would think], “Oh, my God, that was a nightmare!” And it wasn’t. We made our day, and the emotional stuff took a minute, as I knew it would, but we were able to spend the time on the stuff that we wanted to spend the time on, that we needed to spend the time on. I was happy on both fronts.”

The milestone episode airs Thursday, March 27 on CBS. Stream Live and On Demand on Paramount+.