On Her Steffy-versary, Bold & Beautiful’s Jacqueline MacInnes Wood Recalls the Toll the Role Took: ‘I Didn’t Even Look Like Myself’

No one who has watched Jacqueline MacInnes Wood evolve from the new kid on the block to a leader among leading ladies really needs to be told, but let’s be real: She was always fated to be cast by The Bold and the Beautiful as Steffy Forrester, twin sister of ill-fated Phoebe and daughter of Liam/Steffy precursors Ridge and Taylor. After the actress moved from her native Canada to Los Angeles in the spring of 2008, the show her very first audition.

“From the start, I loved working on Bold & Beautiful, although I’d never worked at a pace like that in my life!” she tells Soaps.com. “That first week, I knew all my dialogue because I’d had the scripts for a few weeks while the contracts were being hammered out. We hadn’t actually started taping, so I had time to really sit with the scripts. And then I remember that at the end of that week, they gave me, like, eight scripts for the following week, and it was pretty much non-stop for the first three years!”

Wood isn’t exaggerating, either. Following her June 4, 2008, debut, she and Steffy were given so many hot storylines that it was a wonder that they didn’t get third-degree burns. But as much fun as the future Emmy winner was having, the workload took a toll. “I was in my 20s, so I was trying to balance a lot of different things. They say that at that age, you’re not even thinking, you’re just very impulsive. And that was me!” she recalls. “I was drinking five-hour energy drinks to get me through the day and running on fumes. But I was running myself into the ground to the point where I didn’t even look like myself anymore. I was so thin, and my skin was breaking out.

“That’s when I went to a skin doctor, and to be honest, he gave me a pill and said, ‘Take this.’ And I realized it wasn’t getting to the root of the problem, more like putting a bandage over it,” she adds. “That’s when I realized that I needed to focus on myself and my health and getting myself back on track. And that was before kids! Now, I have the added incentive of wanting to be healthy for not only myself and my husband but for them, too.”

More: Jacqueline MacInnes Wood’s red-carpet looks, ranked [PHOTOS]

Since her June 4, 2008, debut, Wood has transformed Steffy from a cookie-cutter supervixen into an independent whirlwind whose heart is as powerful as her mind — and her mind is particularly shrewd. Well, maybe except when it comes to her love life. “Sometimes I have wanted to strangle Steffy,” she admits, “especially when she was in the triangle with Liam and Hope! She and Liam were so codependent, and it was definitely not healthy.

“But Steffy is such a huge part of my life,” she concludes, “I don’t know what I’d do without her!”

We don’t know what we’d do without her, either!