General Hospital Exclusive: Dominic Zamprogna On Dante’s Wrenching Good-Bye To Sam
Til Death Do Us Part: Wanting to do justice to Dante’s farewell to Sam (Kelly Monaco) kept Dominic Zamprogna up at night.
As Sam’s sudden death continues to rock General Hospital, few characters are more intimately affected than Dante Falconeri, who had gotten engaged to his live-in love the very same day she passed away.
Getting It Right
Before Dominic Zamprogna shot the scenes of Dante finding out that Sam had died and saying good-bye to her at her hospital bedside, he had a strong sense of the gravity of the moment, both for his character and for the show, as that bedside monologue was GH veteran Kelly Monaco’s final scene on the show.
He was so acutely aware of their significance, in fact, that it kept him up at night. “The night before, I didn’t sleep,” he tells Soap Opera Digest. “I slept, I think, an hour-and-a-half that night, because I was like, ‘Man, this is such a big character and such a big thing.’ I knew that Nancy [Lee Grahn, Alexis] was going to bring it, and I knew that Steve [Burton, Jason] was going to bring it, and you don’t want to be the weak link, you know? You really want to try and deliver the goods — but when you’re thinking about delivering the goods, you can’t go to sleep because you’re so worried about delivering the goods!”
The pressure only intensified on the day of filming. “I got to set and my monologue was the last one,” he recalls. “It was like a train of monologues, and Nancy did hers and then Steve did his, and I was doing mine right before lunch. So I was like, ‘Great, I’m gonna [be] up there, I’m gonna be rushed right before lunch….’ I was resigned to [not doing my best]. You don’t want to force anything, and I know from personal experience of loss that sometimes, it doesn’t hit you in the moment that you think it’s going to hit you; it hits you at other times and you’re really caught off-guard by that feeling. But the problem as an actor knowing that there’s a bunch of people watching to see how you do on this major character’s departure that you really have to fight the urge to push something.”
A pep talk from his on-screen father, Maurice Benard (Sonny), came at just the right time. Reports Zamprogna, “Maurice actually knocked on my door and he was like, ‘Hey man, just, just go up there and, and do it.’ He was like, ‘Whatever is there is there,’ you know? And I was like, ‘Cool, man.’ And I really appreciated it because he knows that pressure. I remember a scene he did when I first started on the show where all of us are at the Metro Court restaurant and he freaks out on Claudia. He’d already been [at GH] a long time when I got there, and afterwards, he was like, ‘I was so unbelievably worried about this scene because of everyone that’s in it.’ And that surprised me! So, that day, I was like, ‘He knows what it feels like,’ and I really appreciated him coming to my door. Then it was time to go up [to film it] and it was obviously sad. We did my monologue first, and I asked that we not rehearse the monologue. I said, “I’ll line up so you guys can see where you want cameras and lights and stuff, but can we just do it?” And Rob [Markham], the director, said, “Yeah, go for it.” So we just shot the rehearsal, and everyone was happy with it, and then we shot the next scene. I only had two, and they were short, but I felt really good about them, to be honest with you. I got up from my stool sitting beside Kelly [Monaco, Sam] and gave her a big hug and kiss, and I felt like I honored the material and her character and our relationship. And that was important to me, too. All you can do, like an athlete, is leave it all on the court.”
Zamprogna says that he didn’t go into the scenes with a rigid acting game plan. “In the moment, you’re just being real,” he explains. “You prepare 100 percent, you go up there knowing everything like the back of your hand so that you can be in that moment and be free. In preparation, you think about things that put you in an emotional place. You listen to some music, look at pictures of my kids. And then when you get up there, you kind of really do want to know it so well that whatever you say triggers real feelings. And it was interesting, doing those scenes by her bedside, because I didn’t think about anything in my life [to get to that emotional place]. I put myself in a place where I felt open and honest, and that’s what came out.”
What the actor did do was bring a personal touch to Dante’s dialogue. He shares, “In the rehearsal in the morning, I said, ‘I’m gonna add a couple of things.’ Just things that were important to me and I felt would be important for the character that I wanted in there. It was tricky because it was sort of written — which I think was cool — that he’s in a little bit in denial of what’s happening. But I just felt that it needed [references] to real experiences, for me and for that character, and important ones. So I just said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna add these couple of things in here,’ and they were cool with it.” He points out, “You’re not changing the meaning, you’re not changing the scene, you’re just enhancing it.”
Specifically, he added the reference to Sam saving his life. “Those words that I added, I really lived them as a character,” he notes. “And I added that in because I was like, ‘She saved Dante’s life.’ When he was going to shoot Peter August and she stopped him, that was a moment where she saved his life. Who knows where he would be if Sam hadn’t stopped him from doing that that day?”
It wasn’t until after Zamprogna shot the monologue that he filmed the moment of Dante learning of his fiancée’s demise. “I’ve never really been quite so broken down in a scene as I was in those scenes leading up to [the bedside monologue] when Nancy’s holding my face,” Zamprogna says. “It kind of took me by surprise. We did the other scenes with Sonny in the hallway, and when Dante comes off the elevator with Rocco and that scene with Nancy, which I didn’t really plan to be that [emotional]. It was just, in that moment, the way she was describing how Sam had taken her last breath … She just did it so beautifully, and the way she described it reminded me of times I’ve experienced that loss in real life, and it just painted this unbelievably sad picture in my mind.” When you’re that connected to the material, he adds, “You don’t have to do anything at that point. You just open your mouth and what comes out comes out.
“There are moments where you’re really proud of the amount of work that you put into something and the result, and this is that for me,” he concludes. “It was really, really important to me, and to my work and to Kelly and what we built over the last four years [of building the Sam/Dante relationship] to make it as real and meaningful as possible. And I left work that day feeling like I’d done some of the best work I’ve done on the show, and that felt good.”
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