You can’t get much more disparate than Genoa City, Wisconsin and Happy, Alabama, but Kelly Sullivan, who played Sage Newman on CBS’ No. 1 soap opera The Young and the Restless, has made the transition without a bump in the road.
Sullivan has gone from the fancy life as Nick Newman’s wife to struggling to get by in the trailer park she calls home as Bonnie, earth mother to all, on Tyler Perry‘s Too Close to Home.
“She’s a matriarch of the family,” Sullivan told Parade.com in this exclusive interview. “She’s the one who takes care of the children and her mother. She stayed in Happy to do that and is holding down the fort as best she can. I hadn’t really ever played a character like that.”
When Season 2 returns, Too Close to Home will pick right up where it left off with a shot ringing out in the trailer park and someone that Bonnie loves will have their life in jeopardy. Whether it is her sister Anna (Danielle Savre), who is newly back in Happy after her affair with the president of the United States was revealed, or her drug-addicted sister Shelby (Brooke Anne Smith), who is partially responsible for the bad guys showing up because she stole a truck that had a load of drugs hidden in the rear, remains to be seen.
In this interview, Sullivan also talks about moving to Atlanta, what else we can look forward to in Season 2, and how she was as surprised as the rest of us when Sage was killed off on Y&R.
In order to do this, you had to move. So what was compelling enough about it that made you want to uproot to Atlanta?
Pretty much Tyler Perry. That sealed the deal for me. I was really excited about being a part of TLC’s first scripted series. That’ll be a part of history, so I was really looking forward to that and just working with Tyler. I had friends that had worked on other shows of his, and his style of working and the pace that he works…I had been on a couple different soap operas, and so I was used to moving at that pace. So I just felt like it was the right job at the right moment of my life, and also, when I read the script, just the characters that he wrote…he writes really strong women and really amazing relationships, I felt very honored to be able to be a part of it.
Bonnie reminds me a little bit of Sage, though, because when we first met Sage, she was a caretaker.
That’s true. She was. You’re right. It’s funny, because when I started playing the role of Sage, that character was so mysterious, and we didn’t really learn a lot about her, I think that the writers weren’t really sure about what they were going to do with the character and where they were going to take her. I didn’t spend a lot of time in that aspect of Sage’s life, but yeah, that’s a good point. Maybe I do play more matriarchs than I think.
What are you allowed to tease about the upcoming season?
As season one ended, this shootout happened in the trailer park. It was left open. Did everyone make it? Also as far as plot lines, what is going to happen with the Washington, D.C. world? Is that going to integrate into the trailer park?
I think this season, there’s a lot of delving deeper into why the characters are as they are, what happened in the past that has brought all of the problems and all the dysfunction … why does that exist?
There’s a lot of time spent with the three sisters and the mother. Why is Jolene (Trisha Rae Stahl) as she is? There’s a couple episodes, where we just go with the history of the three sisters including their rapes. Also with Anna coming back to town, that is stirring up a lot of drama with this love triangle that has been established with Brody (Brock O’Hurn), Bonnie, and Anna.
Bonnie has some really intense moments. She’s pushed to the extent of her will and her strength as far as Jolene is concerned and as far as this man that was in their lives that abused the sisters, and not to tease too much, but we’re going to really visit that a lot. That’s going to go down an entire different rabbit hole of suspense and drama.
And then, Tyler introduces six new characters into the trailer park that really just bring so much to the show. I loved the characters that he brought on. You really are going to get more relationships and more understanding of the world in which they all live in in Happy, Alabama.
There’s more love trysts, love triangles, and more confusion and drama. Yeah, he’s throwing in the kitchen sink this season, and, I think, the audience is really going to love that. It’s funny because after the first eight ended, everyone I talked to was like, “Wait, no, you can’t end it there. Wait, we just got started, and what’s happening?”
You are from Washington state and you went to college in Arizona, neither of those are particularly Southern, so what did you do to become a Southerner?
One of my best friends is from Georgia, near Atlanta, and when I got this role, I said, “Just sit down and talk to me for a while. I’m just going to be quiet. So you just go. Just talk to me. I want to hear your voice,” and she was laughing. She just basically was telling me all about Southern hospitality and Southern people.
I haven’t spent a lot of time in the South, for sure, but for me, it was less about being from the South. It was more about understanding where Bonnie comes from and why she does what she does. But I will say that I think a big theme in this show that Tyler writes over and over again is this big focus on family, loyalty, and relationships.
He just keeps coming back to this family. When I was talking to Tyler, initially, I was like, “How did you come up with these characters, and how do you write women so well and relationships?” And he said, “I just grew up with really strong female characters in my life, and I write what I know.”
On General Hospital and The Young and the Restless, you had a whole team of writers and different directors all the time, but Tyler does it all. What’s that like to work with him?
It’s such a unique experience for me. Like you said, he writes, directs, produces. So he’s the one person that’s basically making all the decisions, where, on any other set, you’ll have 15 to 20 people standing around, and you can’t make a decision without going through the proper channels, because this person has to clear this and then that.
With Tyler, he really goes off of instinct and the feel of the moment, but at the same time, understanding the story that he wants to be told. It’s just ultimate trust. For me, when I’m working with Tyler, he’s the one that’s wearing the hats, and if there’s any questions, if there’s any moments of confusion or anything, it’s like one-stop shopping, which I love. I was thinking, “I don’t know how I’m going to go and do anything else other than this without going, ‘Wait a minute, this is taking too long. Wait, why do we have to ask 20 people?'”
He’s very collaborative, which is really just a dream for an actor, because in a process where you’re down there for such a short amount of time and you’ve got so much material to conquer every day, the fact that he is so collaborative just really makes it such a special. Every single moment is a real team effort. It’s really rare, it’s really special, and I was just pinching myself every day.
I was really shocked when they killed Sage off on The Young and the Restless.
I was, too.
Was it always supposed to be that way, or it changed because they had so many writer changes?
You’re right. We had the new writers come in, and I think they were just looking to make some changes. They’ll do that a lot on soaps when they’re just trying to shake things up and create storylines. I definitely was surprised. I found out a couple weeks before. I understood why they did it, 100 percent, and I thought they did it really well. I think that in order to kind of keep moving on that storyline, it was like, well, we can do A, B, or C, and where are we going to get the most mileage? I think that always, in someone’s death, there comes five other storylines, and everyone else is affected by it, but it was funny because it was like, as soon as Sage figured it out, as soon as she connected the dots, it was like, “Oh, no! You’re dead.”
Season 2 of Too Close to Home premieres tonight at 9 p.m. on TLC.
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