The whole time you’ve been on the show, you’ve played a cop, which can be a blessing and a curse on daytime. “Yeah [pause] — what’s the blessing part?”
Steady employment? “Yeah, totally — Dante will always have a job as a cop and as long as I don’t complain about being a cop on the show, I’ll have a job, too. That is a super-big challenge. I do get frustrated, because I don’t watch a lot of TV, but every once in a while, I’ll put on NCIS or something just to see the cops actually winning, you know? And I’m like, ‘Oh, cops do win things!’ Because we never do on the show; we just don’t. And I don’t know why, really. I know it’s a soap, but to me, it doesn’t matter — daytime, prime-time, we’re all making TV and trying to make it good. Would I like to actually see him solve a case? Yeah! But I’m not losing any sleep over it.”
Over the years, I imagine the PCPD set has become a bit of a home away from home for you. Do you keep anything in your desk drawers? “No, because they empty it out all the time. If you were to leave something in there, it would probably end up disappearing into the bowels of Prospect Studios. But you’re right, there is a comfortability that I feel with it, for sure. The other day, Frank [Valentini, executive producer] was directing and he was like, ‘I want you to come down here to your desk and open your drawer and take the gun out.’ And I was like, ‘That’s not my desk.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, well, go to your desk and take the gun out of the drawer.’ I was not going to say anything; I was thinking, ‘Maybe he just wants the shot this way.’ But then I was like, ‘No, I’m going to tell him because it feels weird to me to go into this drawer. It doesn’t feel like my desk!’ It definitely is a home away from home for my character and a comfortable place to do scenes.”
Dante has had a couple of partners over the course of his PCPD career. People really dug the Dante/Nathan partnership, which became a tight friendship outside of work, as well. Why do you think fans responded so well to it? “Because Ryan [Paevey, ex-Ryan] is so dreamy! You know, as it’s happening in real time, you don’t really know what people like or why they like it. But I know when we’re doing good work, and I think we just complemented each other. Michael Easton [Finn], when he first came onto the show as McBain, he and I really loved the brief time we were playing cops together. We thought that could have been a really cool thing and we still talk all the time about how fun it was. I think people would have really dug that partnership. But with the Nathan thing, you know, he was with Maxie, and Dante was with Lulu, and we were all best friends. We were this little unit. And there was a lot of cop stuff being written at that time. There were a lot of bad guys running around. I still don’t think we solved anything, but we looked good not solving stuff!”
Equally dreamy, arguably, was who Dante was teamed with after Nathan’s death, Chase. Do you miss having Josh Swickard (Chase) as a partner? “Oh, yeah, I love Josh. He’s a really great guy and I get along with him really well. It’s cool because lately we’ve been doing more scenes together because Chase wants to be a cop again and I’m his sounding board for that. I really do enjoy our dynamic, as well. He came onto the show right before I left [in 2018] — I left maybe five months later, so our joke was, like, ‘I’m out of here because this guy sucks!’ Which, obviously, is not the case. I don’t know what they’re going to do, but I would welcome Chase coming back to the PCPD because we need good detectives — or at least people who make the audience believe we might actually solve a crime.”
Did you ever have a beef with Steve Burton when he was playing Jason because he always got to be the one to kill this evildoer or that evildoer? “Nah, are you kidding me? That guy was there for, like, 25 years! I would never have thought I would ever be the chosen one to shoot the bad guy over the show’s leading ‘shooting the bad guy’ star. I never had any illusions of grandeur.”
Can you recite the Miranda rights from memory? “Yeah. Do you want me to?”
No, I believe you. Was there a learning curve for you when it came to looking like you knew what you were doing with guns and handcuffs? “I still don’t know what I’m doing with handcuffs! I hate working with handcuffs. I find them so annoying. If I know the camera isn’t going to see the cuffs, we just fake it because I can’t stand them. I played a cop a bunch of times before GH, so I didn’t feel like it was out of my comfort zone at all to do. I’m not a huge gun guy in real life, but I do know how to look like I know what I’m doing with one.”
How do you think you would fare as a cop in real life? “I don’t think I would be a great cop. I think I would take things too personally and probably freak out. I don’t think I’m calm enough to be a cop, you know? It seems like a job for a much lower-heart-rate type of person than I am.”
