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EXCLUSIVE

Exclusive: Meet GH's Lydia Look

Though Lydia Look has been playing Ms. Wu (now known as Selina Wu) since 2015, her role has expanded in recent months.

Look’s uptick in screen time “is a complete surprise for me,” she marvels. “I’m so thrilled, but it was something I didn’t expect.” Ditto the warm response she’s been getting online. “I really didn’t expect that kind of reception. I’m a Twitter newbie; I’ve had an account set up since 2013 but I’ve never really checked it. Then a friend of mine told me, ‘You’ve been getting a lot of comments on Twitter, you should probably check it out.’ I went on one day to take a look and I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ The things that people were saying, I just didn’t expect it. I think I’m very lucky; I’m in the right place at the right time.”

The Singapore native counts herself among Selina’s fans. “Kudos to the writers of GENERAL HOSPITAL,” she declares. “I am so excited every time I open my script. I go, ‘They’ve given me these words to say? I am so blessed.’ I have not been disappointed once. They have made me so intelligent, so well-spoken, so smart, so tough, and I go, ‘This is better than any prime-time character I’ve been given so far!’ I am so grateful to this writing team for representing me the way I’d like to be represented on screen: as a smart, tough, Asian woman who holds her own against the men in our world. It’s already hard holding your own against men as a woman, and it’s a double challenge when you’re a minority, but that has never been an issue with me with the scripts. It has always been so gratifying. I read it and I go, ‘Yeah!’ She is just a dream, a dream character to work with.”

Her GH career began fairly inauspiciously. “When I started out on GH, I was an under-five; I just came in once a year for the mob meetings,” the actress points out. “I had come in 10 or 15 years ago to read for Mark [Teschner, casting director] for the role of a doctor. Obviously, I didn’t get it and I thought Mark forgot all about me. Then all of a sudden, in 2015, I got a call from my agent and he said, ‘Hey, Mark Teschner from GH called and asked if you would come in and do a couple of lines. It’s a really great character, she’s a mob boss.’ And I was like, ‘Hell, yeah! A mob boss? Sure!’ So I came in and I did that and for a couple of years after that, it was just a once a year thing, and then there was a maybe two-year lapse where we didn’t have a mob meeting. But in the last year or two, it’s started to grow more and more, and I am just so chuffed. I don’t know what I did to deserve this! I just couldn’t ask for a better journey to be on than the one I’m on with GENERAL HOSPITAL.”

She thanks the viewers for embracing her presence on the show. “For them to support me as Selina Wu, to see them latch onto me and love me for bringing my truth into Selina, I am just so grateful,” sums up Look. “It validates me, my journey, my craft, my truth. That, to me, means more than anything in the world.”

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