What Was Krista Allen Doing Before She Joined The Bold And The Beautiful?

From 1996 to 1999, "Days of Our Lives" fans knew Krista Allen as the second Billie Reed, the other love of Bo Brady's (Peter Reckell) life when he didn't believe his beloved Hope (Kristian Alfonso) would ever be with him again. Allen's version of Billie even gave birth to Bo's daughter and believed she had died. (Bo would learn years later that she hadn't.) After Billie left town, Allen left soaps seemingly for good as her career went in a different direction for the first few decades of the 21st century.

Now, Allen is back on soaps as a recast Taylor Hayes on "The Bold and the Beautiful" and is busy making the character her own while getting a positive reaction from fans. While Taylor has a different face, her feelings are the same. She's still in love with Ridge Forrester (Thorsten Kaye) and, as of this writing, thinks she may have won him back from Brooke Logan (Katherine Kelly Lang) once again. But what was Allen up to during the years between her two soap opera gigs?

During her more than two decades between soap operas, Krista Allen was all over the television dial with roles in made-for-TV movies, as well as guest parts on series like "Melissa and Joey," "Hawaii Five-O," and "Modern Family". However, Krista Allen veered away from acting for a while after trying her hand at stand-up comedy both onstage and off, and it made her see things about herself she never realized.

"I started doing stand-up — I didn't do it for that long — I wrote for people ... And then I realized it was about the confidence and getting up there but I realized I was bullying the crap of myself for [laughs]," she told Soap Opera Digest. "I realized I still had a big people-pleaser thing going on in me. ... What I found with stand-up, which is one of the greatest gifts, is I had a lot of unhealed s**t."

That prompted Allen to go back to school and find a second career path that had nothing to do with performing at all. "So I went back to school and I started studying neuroscience and epigenetics, and I started really understanding how trauma affects the body," she explained. "And then was able to segue into working with teens in prison and helping them to understand where they came from."