General Hospital Exclusive: Alexa Havins On Kissing Ryan Paevey as Lulu and Nathan Heat Up
Lulu’s romance with Nathan is heating up on General Hospital, and on the March 18 episode, the couple’s first date went so well that Nathan ended up carrying Lulu upstairs to the bedroom. And while Lulu’s portrayer, Alexa Havins, knows that kissing scenes come with the territory when you sign on to do a soap, she admits that it’s still a little strange to film intimate moments with a man other than her real-life husband, actor Justin Bruening.
What’s in a Kiss?
Havins met Bruening on the All My Children set back in 2003, when they were cast as future lovebirds Babe and Jamie. After a year of friendship, they began dating, and got engaged on the AMC set in 2004, then tied the knot in 2005 and are now raising four children, three daughters and a son. Prior to joining GH in 2024, Havins had considered herself done with acting, choosing to focus on home-schooling her brood while Bruening frequently worked on location on his Netflix series, Steel Magnolias. And since Lulu had been living a chaste life since emerging from her coma two years ago, Lulu and Nathan’s first kiss back in January marked Havins’s first on-screen kiss in many years.
Fortunately, she has a good working relationship with her love interest, Ryan Paevey (Nathan). “Ryan and I definitely get along well,” says Havins. “We’ve fallen into a really comfortable and nice rhythm as co-stars.” She especially appreciates his diligence in rehearsing their scenes. “He’s always hunting me down to run lines,” she chuckles. “And he’s very gracious about the fact that he often has to run lines with me while I’m getting my hair and makeup done. He’ll sit right next to me and we’ll run the lines over and over again — that’s what you have to do, because the volume of dialogue is so much. It’s almost like cramming for a test in high school! We’ll run the lines in the hair and makeup room, and then I’ll go get into wardrobe, like, ‘Okay, I’ll get dressed and find you!’ And then we run them again, and then when we get on set, we run them again. I love that he’s into doing that because it gives us that dress rehearsal and run-through which we don’t really have [formal] time for because we’re filming so much material.”
Still, Havins was a woman on a mission when she and Paevey hit the stage to film their characters’ first kiss — a mission to get it done in one take! “Everyone in hair and makeup was laughing at me saying, ‘Wow, we were watching you on the feed and you were taking charge! “Okay, so I’m going to lean in to you here, and then I’m breaking it after how many beats?”‘ They were kind of giving me a hard time, in a funny way, and I said, ‘It’s because I’m gonna do it once, and I’m gonna get it done! I don’t need to be kissing my co-star four or five times, I’m gonna go home and kiss my husband!”
Sums up Havins, “There are plenty of women that would love to kiss Ryan Paevey, and I’m sure that would be a treat for everyone, and I like him and he’s my friend — but I want to kiss Justin Bruening!”
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