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LOS ANGELES, July 8 (UPI) -- Whether she's playing fictional characters on TV and in movies, appearing as herself on reality TV, creating products or starting social programs, Denise Richards' body of work represents her eclectic goals. "I love to stay busy and I have a lot of different interests," Richards said.
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Richards has a new movie out Friday, but it's only one of her current endeavors. She appears in a cameo in the action movie Money Plane, but has spent much more time filming The Bold and the Beautiful and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills while launching a skin care line and a nonprofit organization.
Money Plane is a vehicle for Adam Copeland, aka WWE superstar Edge. Copeland plays Jack Reese, a professional thief who leads the heist of an airborne casino. Richards plays Sarah, his wife waiting for him at home.
Sarah is only in three scenes of Money Plane that total 1 1/2 minutes of screen time. She helps establish that Reese has a family for whom he's providing and to whom he'll return.
Richards had a larger role in 2017's Altitude, from Money Plane producers Jason Cherubini, Alexander Ferguson, Tyler W. Konney, Ian Niles and Richard Switzer.
"They called and asked if I would do that role," Richards told UPI in a recent phone interview. "I think they do great projects."
Early in her career, Richards was the action heroine. She played a young space marine fighting alien bugs in Starship Troopers and helped James Bond save the world in The World Is Not Enough. Although Money Plane did not allow her to join the adventure, she'd welcome another action role.
"You're like a kid playing and you get paid for it," Richards said. "It's really great to be able to be physical."
Her Bond character, nuclear physicist Christmas Jones, still receives criticism in James Bond retrospectives that appear whenever there's a new Daniel Craig film. Richards was in on the joke, though. The Brosnan films were less serious, so a nuclear physicist named Christmas Jones dressing like Lara Croft was supposed to be humorous.
"It's tongue in cheek," Richards reflected. "You have to have fun with it."
Back to The Bold and the Beautiful
With Money Plane on video-on-demand services, Richards' focus returned to the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful and the reality series The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Bold was the first Los Angeles series to return to production, following COVID-19 safety guidelines, on June 24.
"We all had a big Zoom meeting together to learn what those restrictions are," Richards said.
They include wearing masks between takes and maintaining social distancing guidelines. The Bold and the Beautiful also is enlisting actors' spouses to stand in for their co-stars to film intimate love scenes. Richards' husband, Aaron Phypers, has volunteered.
Richards plays Shauna Fulton, who entered the show with a visit to see her daughter, Flo (Katrina Bowden), in 2019. During that visit, Shauna revealed that the late Storm Logan was Flo's father.
Before The Bold and the Beautiful shut down, Shauna married Ridge Forrester (Thorsten Kaye), a character who has been on the soap since its premiere in 1987, but originally was played by Ronn Moss.
Phypers will stand in for Kaye whenever the story calls for love scenes. They even have backup for when her husband isn't available.
"If [Phypers] is not working, he will be [the stand-in]," Richards said. "Otherwise, those scenes are with a mannequin, so it should be interesting."
The show has not announced an airdate for its new episodes yet.
Real Housewives drama
The reality series Real Housewives of Beverly Hills also took a hiatus due to COVID-19 after the June 3 episode.
The season had completed filming with Richards, Lisa Rinna, Garcelle Beauvais, Kyle Richards, Sutton Stracke, Dorit Kemsley, Erika Girardi and Teddi Mellencamp Arroyave. However, the show still needed to film the cast's in-studio testimonials for the later episodes.
New episodes resume Wednesday. The last episode showed conflict between Denise Richards and the other Housewives because they were talking about threesomes within earshot of her kids.
Richards clarified she was not upset the subject of threesomes came up. Rather, she became annoyed that her co-stars kept talking about it long after the initial conversation ended.
"I didn't understand why the women kept going on and on and on about it," Richards said. "They kept bringing it up, but I didn't care. Like, just drop it."
Richards became more annoyed when the Housewives brought it up at a backyard barbecue with her kids -- Sam and Lola Rose Sheen and Eloise Joni Richards -- present. The other housewives complained that Richards talked about explicit things with them before. They felt she was being hypocritical to limit explicit discussions now.
Richards countered that she'd have different conversations with them when they were alone. She acknowledges that her daughters always could find out what she says on the show, but they don't seek it out.
"My daughters aren't avid viewers of the show," Richards said. "It's an adult show."
When Housewives returns, viewers can expect that Richards did not get her wish. The others still don't let it go.
"They love to beat things into the ground," Richards said. "I'm one that's like onward and upward, let's move on, but they don't seem to move on from things."
The trailer for the new episodes shows Richards threatening to quit the series if Bravo airs a clip of Brandi Glanville claiming they slept together. Richards says her return for another season would entirely depend on who her co-stars would be. Should one Housewife be replaced, it could change the whole dynamic.
"I don't want to pretend I'm friends with somebody that I'm not," Richards said. "To me, it needs to be believable that we would all hang out together."
Quantum Reach Foundation
The 49-year-old actress and reality star also has a skin care line with Canavation Product Group, called CB ME Beauty, and runs a foundation inspired by one of her daughters, Eloise Joni.
Eloise Joni had trouble sitting up and learning to talk because of chromosome 8 deletion, a condition in which those afflicted are missing certain genetic material in their cells.
The actress and her husband formed the Quantum Reach Foundation, a non-profit to create programs for children and animals. It would include helping parents obtain diagnoses for special needs children.
"I'm very lucky that I have the resources and the needs to be able to do that," Richards said. "A lot of people don't."
