Actor and producer Ronn Moss interviewed by Elena Ringo. Ronn Moss is best known for starring in television series “The Bold and the Beautiful” and for being part of rock group Player. Ronn Moss tells Indie Cinema Magazine about his upcoming film “Surprise Trip” and other creative plans.
Elena: On behalf of our magazine, we wish to congratulate you with your 70th birthday! We wish you creative success and happiness.
Ronn: Thank you, much appreciated. Age is just a number to me and I’m grateful and blessed to have good health and happiness in my life.
Elena: At first you began your career as a musician. Did you always want to become an actor? How did you first get cast in B&B?
Ronn: I taught myself to play guitar, bass, & drums after seeing “The Beatles” perform on TV at age 11. By the time I was 14, I was playing in clubs with my teenage band. In my mid 20s, my classic rock band PLAYER was born and we were fortunate to have a few charting hits especially our #1 hit “Baby Come Back.” I didn’t think about acting until my then music manager, Robert Stigwood, pulled me aside and asked if I had ever thought about acting? Robert was responsible for John Travolta’s career with “Saturday Night Fever” at the time and I didn’t think about acting again until PLAYER had a slow spell from touring in the early 80s. I was cast in B&B in 1986 after a casting agent recommended me for the part of Ridge Forrester. It was a very natural fit.
Elena: Your character Ridge Forrester always felt real. Was the character of Ridge close to your personality or not?
Ronn: I was lucky that William Bell who created the show and was the head writer gave me the freedom to make Ridge as I wanted. I incorporated a lot of my interests into the character like my love of motorcycles. When Caroline died, it was my idea to grow a beard as a grieving widower and ride off into the sunset on my motorcycle. It was also my idea to call Brooke by her last name Logan, which the writers began making a frequent addition in the dialogue. So some things of Ronn became Ridge as I began to breath life into that character. Were Ridge and Ronn close in personality and temperament? Not really.
Elena: Which seasons of B&B are your personal favorites? What were the biggest challenges when filming the series?
Ronn: That is kind of hard to say because there were so many, but I enjoyed the beginning of the series when the cast was small and intimate and we really were truly like a family because I spent so much time doing that job. The biggest challenges were memorizing 40-50 pages of dialogue a day and spending so much time in a studio and not having enough time with my kids.
Elena: Was it difficult to adapt to life after B&B ended? A large part of your life, about 25 years, was linked with the series. The series had a busy schedule, was it difficult to work constantly on the series? Do you still keep in contact with the cast?
Ronn: No not at all, I was ready and eager to have the freedom to spend more quality time with my girls, my wife and to go back to music and tour with my band PLAYER. It was intense working as much as we did for that many years. It takes a lot of time. But we have to make choices in life and I chose then to dedicate myself to the work I loved. It’s unusual to have that long a run on a series like that. Work is work. Now… life is life.
I did keep in touch a bit with Katherine Kelly Lang for a while, not so much anymore because it’s been 10 years since I left the show and everyone has gone in other directions with life’s challenges and choices.
Elena: You spend a lot of time in Italy nowadays. Why did you decide to move to Italy? What connects you with the country? Do you know Italian language? What do you do there?
Ronn: I have always had a love affair with Italy. I did my first movie in 1981 in Sicily and Italy has been the country that I have frequented the most over the past several decades. B&B has shot on location there several times and my wife has always wanted to live half the time in Europe. We chose Italy for many reasons, one being the weather in southern Italy reminds us of LA because Puglia in on the Adriatic Sea. We love Italian food and yes I’m learning more and more Italian. I can sing some songs in Italian now and I have my own Masseria dedicated to special events such as, weddings, birthdays and anniversaries. It has an amazing restaurant and spa and carries my own wines. I plan on spending part of spring and summers there and the rest of the time in the states. So Italy is officially my second home now. @MasseriaParetanoByRonnMoss (instagram)
Elena: How did you decide on shooting “Surprise Trip”? How did you get the initial idea for the film?
Ronn: I literally fell in love with the region of Puglia and came up with the idea driving in the car with my producing partner Tiziano Cavailere. It’s about an American stockbroker who goes to Puglia to change his life and falls in love. Minerva Pictures is our distributor for this romantic comedy and we can’t wait to see what digital platform it lands on after it makes the festival rounds. It’s currently at the Hong Kong film festival, as well as the Cannes film festival.
Elena: What are your future creative plans? Concerning your musical career, are you working on new material? Where do you perform nowadays?
Ronn: I’m making my directorial debut in my next film, “Rejected” that I will star in with my wife Devin. It’s a western and a hard core one with a serious story about the abuse of women in the 1800s. I did most of the music for “Surprise Trip” and will do the same with this film. My wife and I have started our own production company 11:11 Films International and intend to create many more projects. I am touring all over Italy this summer.
Elena: Can you tell us about the play you are acting in Belgium?
Ronn: Brasschaatse Huisvrouwen (Housewives of Brasschaatse) is the name of the play and it’s an original play that was written for me back in 2017. We had a very successful run and the producers brought it back in spring of 2020 where we ended up completing only 4 performances of 38 sold out shows. I was locked down for 4 months in Belgium during this period and have returned to complete those performances now.
Elena: You are in very good physical shape. Do you practice some sports? Which?
Ronn: I have also just started to work out again with weights after nearly two years of not much of anything. I have always been into martial arts and enjoy biking, hiking and horse backing riding in my spare time.
Elena: During the last two years our world started to change drastically. We became stripped of most of our freedoms. It was also a hard time for culture due to numerous restrictions of freedom. How did you cope with the limitations due to COVID-19 restrictions? How did it impact your creativity and work?
Ronn: In a way I was lucky to be locked down in Belgium and spent most of my time bike riding with my wife. I kept creative and recorded my last album “Locked Down Lover” during this period all by myself. So the lockdown actually made me more creative. I also had two #1 hit songs in Belgium with the singing artist Ella Luna in a duet I wrote called, “Dreaming In Color” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” as a follow up also with Ella Luna. I never bought into the fear mongering and stayed focused on my goals.
Interview by Elena Ringo.
