If Bold & Beautiful‘s Thorsten Kaye is being honest — and that’s one thing he always is, sometimes brutally — he doesn’t care if you hate Ridge. In fact, he’s not-so-secretly thrilled to hear it.

“I hate when people in this business say, ‘Oh, if my character does that, the audience is really going to hate me,’” he told us shortly after receiving his latest Daytime Emmy nomination. “I don’t care if the audience hates me or not. If you’re going to play a bad guy, make him awful! To do something or play something so someone out there will like you? I do that with my kids, not the audience.”

At the end of the day, he says, “Our job is to commit to something. We need to push the envelope whenever and however we’re able to.”

Sometimes, he admits, that’s easier than others. That certainly was the case when working with John McCook on the scenes surrounding Eric and Ridge’s conflict. In fact, so strong was that material that both of the men landed Emmy nominations by including scenes from the storyline on their reels.

“We’re all sons, and some of us are father,” explained Kaye. “So when you play that on screen, it’s easy to get sucked into, both as an actor and an audience.”

It also provided a nice break from the decades-long saga of Brooke and Ridge, who have been pulled apart and pushed back together more times than a set of Legos. “Any time there’s a party at the mansion, I look around and my wife has slept with everyone there,” jokes the actor. “That’s kinda lost its sting over the years!”

That includes the current scenario, in which it’s not an outside force threatening to cause problems for Brooke and Ridge but rather her decision to keep him in the dark about R.J.’s current angst. “It’s always good to have a new dynamic to play,” he muses. “Obviously, it’s a soap opera so the relationships are important, but we’re not exactly spring chickens anymore. It might be time for Brooke and Ridge to act like the grown-ups they are supposed to be!”

As for the Emmy nomination, Kaye admits he largely let Eva Basler — the soap’s Vice President of Communications and Talent/Public Relations — select scenes for his reel. “She knows her stuff, and she knows what works far better than me,” he acknowledges. “When you’re picking Emmy reel materials, you don’t know who the voting audience is, so it’s hard to know what might resonate. I don’t watch myself, so I leave it to other people to pick, based on what they think or know worked.”