Eva LaRue On Natalia’s Death On General Hospital: ‘I’ve Never Been Killed Before!’ (EXCL)
On the June 30 episode of General Hospital, Natalia Ramirez fatally overdosed on a mixture of pills and booze, and on the July 1 show, she was officially declared dead. For Eva LaRue, whose exit from GH coincided with the demise of her character, this marked a career milestone of sorts. “I’ve never been killed before,” she reports. “This is my first time to die!”
Exit Strategy
It was not how the actress expected Natalia to go out, she tells Soap Opera Digest. “I thought Natalia was going to go off and meet up with [her rock star daughter] Blaze, wherever she was out in the world, because my character kept saying, ‘I want to make up with with Blaze. I’ve got to talk to her because she needs me. I’m gonna join her on tour.’ ”
She found out about Natalia’s fate when she read her final GH scripts — and she was totally on board. LaRue says, “To be honest, the way I went out, while surprising, was actually like an actor’s greatest gift because they gave me these scenes to leave by that were so juicy and delicious. If they had just had me go off into the sunset and get on a plane and join Blaze, it would have kind of all been for naught… It would have been a boring exit!”
What happened instead, LaRue enthuses, “was great!” The way she sees it, “Natalia just goes into a full-on life spiral — a full-on, huge, juicy arc of a life spiral over the course of a couple of days. And that, I was really grateful for. As an actor, I was just like, ‘Oh, my God, these are delicious!’ In your lifetime, whether you’re doing daytime or nighttime [TV], rarely as an actor do you get those kinds of scenes.”
LaRue, who spent the majority of her soap career playing Maria Santos on All My Children, notes, “At All My Children, there were plenty of gift scenes over the years, but the ones that really stand out are giving the baby up at the airport to his birth mother [Kelsey, the mother of the child Maria had been poised to adopt, Sam] and delivering my own baby [Maria’s daughter, Maddie] with Erica in a cabin — I mean, there are just so many scenes that soap operas gift you that nighttime shows and even feature films don’t always, you know? They’re just those rare scenes where you’re like, ‘Wow. This is why I got into the business. This is what I do.’ ”
Go Time
Similarly, LaRue smiles, her last stretch on GH “was fun because because I had all of these drunken scenes.” But the challenge notched up considerably “on the dying day, [because] I have never, thank God, experienced a massive panic attack before, but I have friends who have them frequently and luckily have described them to me. And so I tried … I just threw myself into what I thought my friends’ worst panic attacks would feel like. And that was really satisfying as an actress, you know what I mean? And the panic attack gives way to popping these anxiety pills and washing them down with a bunch of booze and then still not being over the panic attack, or having another wave of it and going back to the pill bottle and then at some point forgetting how many you’ve taken because you’re drinking at the same time, and she just basically accidentally kills herself. It was heavy, and I was so nervous days before because I thought, ‘I really want to do this justice.’ ”
In the end, she was pleased with the results. “I was really happy that they gave me those departing scenes,” she nods. “That was awesome.”
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