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EXCLUSIVE! DAVID OTUNGA ON GH CAMEO

Otunga Williams

WWE star David Otunga pops in to GENERAL HOSPITAL on July 30 to visit with his dying fan, Bergen Williams's Alice; he'll also interact with Bryan Craig's Morgan and Kristen Alderson's Kiki. The real-life fan ("One of my favorite scenes that caught everybody off-guard was when Sonny and Ava had sex in the crypt. That was crazy!") sees a symmetry between the soap genre and the world of professional wrestling, noting, "One of the things that we say, when we try to explain WWE to people, is that it’s a live-action soap opera. The core fans that we have, it’s not really about the in-ring stuff, it’s the storylines behind it and what the matches mean, the feud going on between the two guys. That’s what really keeps people engaged and coming back for years on end."

His own wrestling persona reminds him of one of GH's most beloved figures. "Sonny is definitely one of my favorite characters," he explains, "because in wrestling, I play a bad guy, and he is kind of similar to that, but he still has his own redeeming qualities and I have that in my character, too, so I appreciate that." Otunga describes preparing for his first daytime appearance as "easy. In WWE, we usually don’t get our scripts beforehand, so we’re used to just cramming at the last minute or even improvising. With this, I got my script beforehand, so I thought, ‘This is going to be easy!’ So I got it all memorized and everything and went in there all confident and it went really well. But I know that the actors on the show, they get a huge volume of scripts and lines to learn, which is a little harder. I just had one script, so it was easy for me, but I really appreciate what those performers can do."

He also marveled at soap's legendarily quick pace. "They just did the blocking, who will be sitting, who will be standing, and that’s it. And when it was time to roll, we literally ran through it one time and then we took it, which is amazing. I thought that was so cool. I come from the film world, too, where it’s take after take after take. But this is like one rehearsal and then you shoot it and we did it on the first try. It was a lot of fun." Tune in to catch Otunga's daytime debut.

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