Actor, musician, and celebrity golf pro Jack Wagner has risen to a number of challenges over the course of his four-decade career in Hollywood. But 2,000+ episodes of General Hospital and The Bold and the Beautiful could never have prepared him for one aspect of Dancing With the Stars.

“I’ve always been plugged into the theater, always been around dance and theatrics. So when I wound up doing Dancing With the Stars, here I am with ballroom-trained dancers, and it was intense,” Wagner told Entertainment Weekly ahead of his return to The Bold and the Beautiful on June 16.

“All of the contestants, we would say the most petrifying thing of all is when you’re ready to do your dance, your partner’s on the left side, you’re on the right of the curtains, and the announcer goes, ‘Dancing the samba: Jack Wagner!’ Paralysis sets in you forget everything that you’ve learned for the last week,” he recalled. “Everybody shared the same thing: ‘When they announce your name like that, right?’ It’s this complete blackout.”

Wagner competed on season 14 of Dancing With the Stars. He was paired with pro Anna Trebunskaya, who brought two of her celebrity partners (season 2’s Jerry Rice and season 10’s Evan Lysacek) to the finals across her 11 seasons on the show. Wagner didn’t make it far, being eliminated second, but he did compete alongside an important future costar: Little House on the Prairie‘s Melissa Gilbert, whose When Calls the Heart character shared a romance with Wagner’s during a two-episode arc in February.

The prolific TV star said he was shocked by his own reaction to former host Tom Bergeron’s grand announcements at the top of each dance, because he’s had so much prior experience with dance and live entertainment.

“I’m a song-and-dance guy, I’m from the theater and trained theatrically,” he said. “So when I did three years on General Hospital, I went right to a national tour of West Side Story, and we rehearsed in New York, all Broadway dancers and a Broadway cast. Then in ʼ88 I did a national tour of Grease, then Jekyll & Hyde in 2000 on Broadway.”

But still, even though Wagner said he loves “live anything, live concerts, theater,” being announced in such startling fashion “was something that I really hadn’t experienced before.”

Wagner’s next move is a long-anticipated return to The Bold and the Beautiful, the CBS soap he starred on from 2003-2012. Nick Marone, the character Wagner originated at start of his 10-year run, is coming to the rescue of his old flame, Katherine Kelly Lang’s Brooke Logan, just as she’s begun to hit the skids with Thorsten Kaye’s Ridge Forrester.

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“To come back and just kind of lock-in with Kelly was great,” he said. “It’s like we haven’t missed a beat. I compare it to hopping on a moving train, because of the speed soaps work at now. But it’s also like a class reunion. You get to catch up, and you hug, and you share.”