Why ‘B&B’ Almost Killed off Scott Clifton’s Liam Spencer — And Then Didn’t

If things had gone according to plan, the wedding between The Bold and the Beautiful‘s Liam Spencer (Scott Clifton) and Hope Logan (Annika Noelle) this week wouldn’t have happened at all.

That’s because the show’s executive producer and head writer, Bradley Bell, had originally scripted a storyline in which Liam would die from a brain tumor, a dramatic shocker he ultimately couldn’t go through with.

“As a writer, I feel like I have to do things that are unpredictable to keep people on their toes,” Bell tells TV Insider exclusively. “And for them to know that there’s just about anything I might do for a great twist or a great payoff or wonderful scenes. But when it came down to it, I thought of the body of work that Scott has done, and the incredible actor that he is, and I couldn’t do it. I really struggled long and hard with that one.”

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When TV Insider spoke to Clifton at the start of the story in April, he genuinely believed his exit was a done deal, which made the reversal even more surprising. “There was this sort of trickle-down effect of knowledge,” he recalls. “There were times where Brad had made this decision to kill Liam, and I didn’t know that, and then there was a time where I knew that, but I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody else that. And then there was a time where I could tell other people on set that, but I couldn’t tell the press that, and then there was a time where I knew that that actually wasn’t happening, and so on and so forth.”

Despite the uncertainty, Clifton, who marked 15 years at the soap in July and has won three Daytime Emmys for his portrayal of Liam, stayed focused on the work. “There was this, I don’t know, epistemic gatekeeping happening for everyone throughout the entire process,” he explains.

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While online chatter speculated that he might return to his General Hospital roots as Dillon Quartermaine, the character he played from 2003-2007, Clifton kept his attention on what he thought was Liam’s final chapter. “There were people that were saying to me, while I was still shooting this story, ‘Are you going to go back to General Hospital?’ or, ‘What are you going to do next?’” he shares. “And I had to kind of shut people down a little bit. Like, ‘Can you not ask me about that? I’m not ready to think about that. I just want to tell this story the best I can. I’m never going to have another story like it, and it means I’m not working here anymore, but I get to do this, like, love letter death story, and I really want to focus on that.’”

Then everything changed with one unexpected phone call. “At a certain point, it was Brad calling me at home, and he was really kind about it,” Clifton relays. “It was basically, ‘I changed my mind. I don’t want to kill Liam off after all.’ I was like, ‘How are you going to do it?’ And then he said, ‘I have some ideas.’ I hung up the phone, and I did a little happy dance.”

Clifton was impressed by Bell’s solution, that Dr. Grace Buckingham (Cassandra Creech) faked Liam’s diagnosis in order to bilk his father, Bill Spencer (Don Diamont), out of money for “experimental treatment” to save Liam, a scheme meant to cover her ex-husband’s gambling debts. “Sure enough, he found the most clever way to keep Liam alive, given all the work he had done to establish that he had a giant tumor in his head,” praises Clifton. “How he did that and how he incorporated Cassandra into that storyline was so cool, as was getting to work with her. I got to have my cake and eat it, too, because I got to have all these really salient, deep, wonderful moments and then not die, and not have to say goodbye.”

Howard Wise/jpistudios.com

Instead of closing the book on Liam’s life, Bell chose to turn the page, reuniting him with ex-wife Hope and remarrying the pair. “I have such great appreciation for Scott as a human being and an actor,” Bell adds. “And after all that Hope and Liam have been through, to keep the character alive and see this family come together just won out in the end in my mind.”

Clifton doesn’t take the reprieve for granted. “I must have been among the luckiest any soap actor has been, just in terms of things working out about as well as they possibly could for that actor,” he points out. “It got good performances out of me, thinking I was leaving, so I was giving it my best shot. Not like I would have been slacking if I knew the ending from the beginning, but I really cherished that story, and I still got to stick around.”

The Bold and the Beautiful, Weekdays, CBS