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EXCLUSIVE: Tonight’s Daytime Emmys ceremony will be bittersweet for Krista Allen, the actress who plays Dr. Taylor Hayes on The Bold and the Beautiful.
Up for her first Emmy after joining the sudser in 2021 as a replacement for Hunter Tylo, Hayes will be attending the ceremony as an out-of-work actress. That’s right, soap fans: Allen says she was told in October that her contract wouldn’t be renewed; she hasn’t appeared in an episode since Nov. 8.
“The craziest thing is right before I got dropped, I did the cast photo shoot, and then the next week they called and said, ‘we’re not going to keep your third year and thank you very much, you were wonderful and thank you, goodbye,” Allen tells Deadline. “And I was like, what?”
“I think the hardest thing for me has been trying to stay quiet. I haven’t known what to say. And then when I got dropped, I was like, ‘oh, okay, is the show going to announce this?’ But they never did. And then on December 10, just recently, it was Taylor’s two-year anniversary [of being back on show], and I came back to Twitter for the first time since June to engage with fans again, just to say thank you because there were so many congratulations and people saying, ‘I can’t wait to see you back on screen’ and ‘when are you coming back?’”
A spokesman for the show tells Deadline they do not comment on the status of casting. An insider revealed, however, that Allen was offered the chance to recur and she declined.
A rep for Allen countered by saying his client was offered the opportunity to say three lines for an episode “after a couple months of nothing.”
Both Allen and her myriad fans started to notice a change in her character’s presence on the show shortly after she received her supporting actress nomination in April. Getting recognized by NATAS was an impressive feat for Allen, who was tasked with replacing the popular Tylo as the psychiatrist who stole Ridge Forrester’s heart (Tylo left the show in 2019). Taylor’s romance with Ridge was constantly tested by Brooke Logan (Katherine Kelly Lang); the love triangle turned into one of the daytime drama’s biggest story lines.
“There was a lot of pushback early on from fans who said, ‘we do not want her recast. Please don’t.’ I understood because she had been their person,” says Allen, who got her start in the soap world by playing Billie Reed on Days of Our Lives from 1996 to 1999. “So that was really hard for me at the very beginning, just stepping into that and knowing what I was up against. But somehow the fans accepted me and it became this beautiful love affair with the fan base as this new Taylor. So when the Emmy nominations came out and I was nominated, I was blown away. It was my first year as a recast. It was kind of like against all odds.”
A month later, something had changed, she recalls.
“I just wasn’t being written,” Allen recalls. “I just wasn’t in the scripts and there’re only a couple of weeks ahead in the writing, so I was like, what is going on? So I just waited. And the fan base was going insane during this time because the character of Taylor was needed on the show. There was a lot of stuff going on and people were starting to tweet about it. They were starting to say, where is Taylor? And there was hashtags and all of this stuff trending on Twitter. ‘Where is Taylor? Bring back Taylor, bring back Krista.’ The show just said that my character wasn’t really needed.”
“My agent had called and I had kind of inquired, but nobody was giving me any information, and so was just, I was like, you know what? Everything’s going to be fine. Things come and go and everything is cyclical,” continues Allen. “I just figured that that was the situation, but then I was dropped, so that was it.”
Allen says she only appeared in eight episodes between the time she got the nomination and the day she was told she was off the show. There were no big goodbyes. The only cast member she heard from was Kimberlin Brown, who texted earlier this week to wish her good luck at tonight’s ceremony.
“I don’t think anybody [on the show knows] because I would imagine if anybody knew that my contract was dropped, I would’ve heard from everybody. But I didn’t text everybody. I’ve been in a place of not knowing what to do or say. That’s really the truth of it. And here we are on this amazing day, and I am so excited. And tomorrow I take off. I’m moving to Atlanta, Georgia. It just seemed like the perfect time to go. It’s turning the page on this really interesting chapter, and now we’re going to the next one.”
Allen has no idea if her role will be recast, but she hopes it will. “I think Taylor is needed. She was so missed whenever Hunter didn’t come back. The most ironic part of it is that it’s like a real life soap opera. This is the Friday cliffhanger!”
Krista Allen, Gilles Toucas/CBS
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