John McCook from A to Z
Family, fun and Forrester are key words in this B&B actor’s life.
On – screen and off, John McCook (Eric Forrester, The Bold And The Beautiful) is the passionate patriarch. He is the father of six on the soap opera, while in real life, he has four children: Jake, 18; Becky, 16; Molly, 9 – with wife Laurette, and a son – Seth, 27- from his union with the late Juliet Prowse.
The mellifluous McCook definitely has a way with words, so this urbane yet down-to-earth gentleman makes the perfect participant for SOAPOPERA WEEKL’S ongoing – and revealing – A to Z series.
ANGER: I don’t express it very well. I don’t get angry often, so that’s why I don’t have any practice with it.
BECKY: Beautiful, accomplished, athletic. We don’t thinks she wants to be an actor. She doesn’t know yet, either. That’s fine. She likes children; she likes the idea of a children’s hospital. She might be doing some work there as a candy striper this summer.
CYNICISM: Only for laughs am I cynical. I think cynicism is a truly interesting form of with sometimes. But I’m not a cynical person at all. I’m a romantic – and still excited to be in show business. It’s a hard business, and sometimes it’s not good for you if you’re an actor. But I can’t be cynical about it.
DAYTIME DRAMA: Now I getting cynical. (Smiles) No, it’s been great to me ever since I started – which was playing Lance Prentiss on The Young and the Restless for Bill Bell.
ERIC: He’s my buddy. I’m liking him even more than I used to because he’s not just a nice guy anymore. He’s learning, he’s finding out that he can’t always be kind, because people will try to take things from him or make bad decisions for him. So he has more of an edge now. As an actor, that’s al lot of fun to play.
FEAR: It’s mortality, I guess. Aging. That is debilitating to me – the fear. I am aware of getting older and aware that my kids are of an age where I’m concerned about how long I will be healthy, how long will I be able to be an actor. It’s the only fear I really have. It’s a legitimate one. Though it’s not something I dwell on it is something to be aware of – to get older but not be able to live. I think that’s because we’re all so aware of illness out thee. There’s a terrible image of a person who can’t enjoy their life anymore.
GROWING UP: Laurette and I, we’re doing that together. We have been married a long time – 20 years. We are finally so comfortable and familiar with marriage and a relationship that we go, “How sad that we didn’t come to this place a year after we got married.” How unfortunate that kids who get married in their 20s don’t come to that place so much sooner. But a lot of people don’t ever get there.
HOME: It’s the best thing in my life. We have a family that is funny, involved, busy, growing, changing constantly. We all respect each other.
IRONY: All I ever wanted to do was be onstage, to be involved with music, play piano, sing. I guess it’s kind of ironic that I don’t get to do those things very often these days. My joy now is with my job at Bold and Beautiful and with my family. I need – and want – to be at home, so I don’t want to do musical theater that much right now.
JAKE: He’s a great kid. Jake is now taller than I am. He’s this young man stepping out into world. He wants to be a filmmaker; he’s taken various classes at Cal State Northridge, AFI, UCLA film school, and in September will attend the Los Angeles Film School. Very cool.
KARMA: I do believe what you put out there is going to come back, whatever you’ve done. I don’t believe it comes from any cosmic place, but from the way you treat people in you various relationships.
LAURETTE: She’s my pill. We can call each other our pill because that’s what we are. It goes far beyond loving her an wanting to be with her. Our romantic relationship has been there from the beginning, but there’s also this wonderful commitment and partnership and knowing that we’ll always be there for each other; knowing that if the worst thing in the world happened – whatever it was – we would be together at the end of it.
MOLLY: She has a kind of out-there funniness from being the youngest in a family of five, having a need to be noticed. She loves music; sings around the house. She puts on funny hats and glasses, for instance, while carrying a science book on her way to the playroom to do her homework. Molly is very comfortable performing. So we’ll see. I mean, I’m not going to say no to that. I’d like to be an actor one day, too. (Grins)
NARROW-MINDED: Well, it’s a bad thing in our world today that encompasses prejudice, racism, being staid and old-fashioned. I don’t know many people who are narrow-minded, so I don’t have to deal with that.
OUTDOORS: I grew up in California, which means camping in the mountains, hiking in the wood. It’s an old-fashioned concept. When I was a kid, my family would go to Yosemite (National Park), and we’d camp in a big canvas tent. Things are different right now. It’s harder to find a remote spot to go to. My kids aren’t as familiar with living in a tent as I have been. I think that’s fun. We have a cabin in the High Sierras, and my kids are rightly concerned about the threat of bears. Putting up a tent in front of the cabin is not a good idea, so my kids have lost out a little bit.
PARIS: Oui. We were there to celebrate our 29th wedding anniversary in February. We stayed in the same small hotel that we were in before. We didn’t go anywhere outside the city other than to Versailles, which was gorgeous, of course. The rest of the time we were on the Metro, going all over town. Lots of walking – and holding hands. We went to wonderful restaurants. Checked out the flea markets, the nasty ones and the great ones. We did what every other married couple does: We stopped talking about the kids for a few days – and enjoyed each other.
QUEST: It’s such a poetic word. To me, that means The Quest – a.k.a. The Impossible Dream – from Man of La Mancha, which I have sung many times in the theater. It’s not a difficult song to sing; it just builds and builds. What is difficult about it is keeping it from being just a song and making it a commitment from the character, an explanation of why Don Quixote is who he is, and why he’s on this quest. I like being able to define somebody’s life as a quest for something. I don’t think we have enough of that in our lives these days.
RELIGION: I grew up going to church, singing in the choir. It’s sill a part of my life. We go to church; our children go to Sunday school. But we are not evangelistic about it. It’s not my concern in other people, but only how they treat other people – and how they treat me.
SETH: He works at a video post-production facility in the (San Fernando) Valley. I don’t see him enough. But I make it my job to remind him that I’m there for him, if he chooses to allow me [to be], because we only see each other a couple of times a year. If he was 14, I would worry about that. But he’s grown-up now. He has a profession, and he does it well. I suspect he’s not comfortable with my other family, although it’s never really been discussed. I miss seeing him.
TRUTH: That’s something I’ve had to learn about over the years, because when I was an adolescent, I used to lie about stuff a lot. I would rather tell a small lie than deal with the momentary upset that would follow coming clean with something, even though down the road you would cause more hurt to somebody when they discovered that you’d lied. I would do that with Laurette at the beginning of our relationship. She needs more than the truth. My kids are learning that lesson very well. That’s something you learn at home. I didn’t learn it very well – through no fault of my parents. I’m just saying I didn’t learn it well until later in life.
UMBRAGE: What offends me? People who are deigning to do this work. I don’t like that. Because I’m doing it – and I’m not a fool. I take umbrage at anybody who thinks they’re better than what they’re doing in their life. I just wanna say. “Then don’t do it; go away.! I have seen that attitude in the theater, but I don’t really see that on my show.
VOCALIZING: I do it some, but not enough. When I’m about to do a show like Man of La Mancha, I’ll start up again. It’s particular shame of mine. As a professional, I don’t maintain that particular instrument the way I should. If a producer wanted me to start work on Wednesday, I’d need more time than that. But if I was vocalizing, I’d be ready tomorrow. I admit it.
WITTY: Y’know, wit doesn’t just mean being funny. Wit means that they’re bright and are on top of things, and can talk about things in a facile way. You’d see examples of wit on the old game shows like What’s My Line?, where the panelist were quick and clever and had an easy charm about them. But wit can be pretty low-class humor, too, with slapstick and bathroom jokes, as long as it’s intelligently though-out.
X-RATED: I haven’t much use for pornography as entertainment. I’m not narrow-minded, so I don’t mind if someone wants to rent an X-rated movie for viewing in the privacy of their own home. It’s not a bad thing, but porn doesn’t represent true sexuality of love or femininity or masculinity. It’s just graphic humping. It’s not pretty or artistic or romantics. It’s not what a relationship is about.
YOUTH: Being young and uniformed and enthusiastic and running around and bumping into things and making mistakes and having a glorious time while you’re at it is a pretty valuable thing – as long as you continue to grow and learn from your mistakes and put certain things in their place.
ZANY: Zany is a funny word – and being zany is a fun thing to indulge in. I’m not cast as a zany character, but I can do that when the camera isn’t rolling or when I’m away from work. Zany is something that is unexpected or that may be inappropriate. Zany, for me, is the unexpected. ON the set, people laugh when I do my Jerry Lewis imitation because they don’t expect I from me.
Soap Opera Weekly /25/2000