Bonnie Burroughs, who joined the GH ranks as Gladys in July 2019, made her final appearance last week when Sonny sent his cousin back to Bridgeport.
“She definitely had something coming,” acknowledges Burroughs of her scheming alter ego. She sensed that Gladys might not be long for the canvas “when I got the script where she was coming clean with Sasha and genuinely apologizing — and then turned her into the cops. I thought, ‘Oh, no! That’s terrible!’ ” On set, she got confirmation from Executive Producer Frank Valentini that Gladys’s comeuppance was on the nigh, and that she would soon be shooting her final show. “I’m glad I did get that heads-up, because if I hadn’t, when I got the script for the last episode, it would have hit me harder,” she explains.
While Burroughs is sad to be leaving GH, calling it “my favorite job I’ve ever had,” she understands that her exit is storyline-dictated. “That is something that is really a positive aspect about me digesting this,” she says. “I’m convinced there wasn’t anything I did wrong and I’m not second-guessing anything I did. Frank basically said so in as many words. He said, ‘You were only supposed to be here for a few days, and you’ve been here for four years!’ The whole thing was a gift. So even as I grieve, if that’s not too dramatic of a word to use, I just keep remembering that [the job coming to an end] doesn’t take away from the joy of all the time that I got to be there. I just loved every second of it, and that is not diminished by the fact that Gladys is gone.”
The actress recalls that being hired as Gladys came at a pivotal time in her life. “When I started there, I was 58 years old. I’m not saying a 58-year-old person is a pile of bones and dust that needs to be shipped off to a nursing home, but at that point in my life, I was not expecting a big old [career] break! I was just kind of cruising along, having my happy, lucky life, very accustomed to doing short little gigs, so when it turned into more than that, it was just, you know, super-sweet because I’d had decades of … not that!”
Indeed, prior to GH, Burroughs’s lengthiest daytime stint was as ONE LIFE TO LIVE’s Stacey, who she played for a few months back in 1987. Getting the chance to be part of the GH cast for years, she says, “felt like getting to be part of a healthy, supportive family, which allows a person to thrive in the world. Being around these people regularly — not just the actors, but the people behind the camera at GH, who are wonderful — for that amount of time made me part of their family and allowed me to grow the character, to develop my confidence with the work and to have more fun with Gladys and to try new things. It sounds so cheesy, but the family aspect of working on the show really was the greatest gift. It’s so different from just popping in for a job for a day or two, where you’re almost like a temp in an office; the people might be nice, but you don’t really get to know them.”
The kindness of one co-star in particular, Maurice Benard (Sonny), meant a lot to Burroughs as she wrapped her run. “My first-to-last show was the most talking I’d ever done in any episode I’ve ever taped,” she reports. “After we did dry blocking in the morning, Maurice said, ‘Hey, do you want to work on this?’ So we went into his dressing room and worked on it, and that was so special. I appreciated it. We have a great professional rapport and there was something poetic about working with him on my first day and my last day. I texted him after to thank him for the special care he gave me and he texted back saying something like, ‘From what I know of you, you have already won at life.’ And, you know, that’s so true. This is a job. I’ll get more work. [My exit] isn’t a tragedy. And as I continue on with my life, I’m looking forward to my next job. I feel like all that time doing Gladys really has kind of fine-tuned my engine and I can’t wait to apply it to the next thing.”
The actress will miss not only her co-workers, but her dysfunctional alter ego. “I just love Gladys,” she says. “I’m attracted to characters who are messy. Gladys is a liar. She’s never been a fully mature, well-functioning adult. She couldn’t get her act together and in the end, when it got really bad, it was all about self-preservation — at the expense of Sasha’s well-being. I do think that my own kind of good-girl, Girl Scout way of living for most of my life kind of primed me to wish to play a character like Gladys and to be able to pull it off. And I believe I did!”
And should GH call her back at some point, Burroughs would be more than game. “I can imagine Gladys trying to sneak back into Poor Charles in a year or two,” she grins. “As Cynthia Watros [Nina], who I adore, said to me, ‘At least you’re not getting decapitated!’ Which I just loved [laughs]. So, yeah, Gladys isn’t getting decapitated, and maybe she’ll be back one day. That’s part of the fun of soaps, right? They’re so wild and wacky that anything can happen.”
