CHRISTINE BARTOLUCCI/ABC
Drink With Me: Anna (Finola Hughes) and John (Adam Harrington) get to know each other better.
Finola Hughes (Anna) is having a blast working with her new GH scene partner, Adam Harrington (John). “I love him!” she declares. “I adore him. He’s so great — both of our new actors, Adam and Charles Mesure [Brennan], are. Mark [Teschner], our casting director, is just knocking it out of the park! They’re both wonderful people and really good in the roles that they are playing.”
The actress was particularly impressed by the care Harrington took in assuming a role previously played by another actor (Antonio Sabato, Jr., in this case). “It was a really hard thing for Adam to come in and play John, Jagger. It’s very difficult and he knew that. But he’s done a lot of homework. He watched everything. He knows more about GENERAL HOSPITAL in the ’90s than I do!”
While Hughes has embraced Harrington with open arms, her character views his “extremely suspiciously,” she says. “I think that’s the best word for how she feels about the FBI coming into her jurisdiction.” But the dynamic between Anna and John undergoes a shift when she stops by his hotel room and they get to know each other better over drinks. “They go drink for drink,” Hughes reports. “It’s actually quite funny.” With serious undertones, of course, as Anna isn’t exactly in a laughing mood. “She’s really worried about Dante,” the actress explains. “And she can’t confide in Valentin, she can’t confide in Sonny and she can’t confide in Dante. Those are her go-tos. So, she goes to somebody else who’s in law enforcement.”
Anna winds up surprising herself by telling John that he was right to call her out about her blind spot when it comes to Sonny. But, reasons Hughes, “I think Anna is comfortable talking to men about her problems and about things that concern her. And I think she is especially comfortable talking to people in law enforcement about that kind of stuff because, really, if you look back on the ’80s, she grew up doing that, if she wasn’t confiding in Felicia. So, if you think about it, there really isn’t anybody else that she could talk to about what she goes to him to talk to about” — namely, Sonny. Anna opens up to John about how she may have been willing to give Sonny a pass on certain things because he was there for Robin when she loved and lost Stone, John’s brother, to AIDS, at a time when she herself was MIA. “That’s a debt she feels she owes him,” Hughes asserts. “Adam is really, really keyed into [the John/Stone relationship] as an actor and it’s very interesting how he tapped into [John’s] feelings about Sonny and his brother. He’s actually quite resentful of it, but he’s also gutted by what happened to his brother and that he wasn’t there for him. It’s lovely to have that kind of backstory that is so rich.”
Discussing something so personal to both of them allows Anna and John to see one another in a new light. For Anna’s part, says Hughes, “The greater understanding that she comes to is that he isn’t the [jerk] she thought he was [laughs]!”
