General Hospital Exclusive: Ryan Paevey on Nathan Impostor Twist and What’s Next for Cassius
“This was the role I came back to play,” says Ryan Paevey of Cassius Faison, the surprise fourth child of Cesar Faison (Anders Hove) and the man who has been masquerading as Nathan West (Cassius’s twin) since the actor returned to General Hospital last fall. Now that the truth is out, Soap Opera Digest got the inside scoop from the actor about the big reveal — and the possibility of Cassius getting a little too comfortable playing the part of his brother.
The Great Pretender
Paevey spent his initial, 2013-18 run on GH playing Nathan — and until the show was ready to reveal Cassius’s real identity, he was essentially tasked with playing Nathan again. While the show did lay in some clues, like Britt’s (Kelly Thiebaud) recent reference to an additional Faison sibling, and “Nathan” slipping up by saying something about his childhood as Cassius to Lulu (Alexa Havins), it was important to the powers-that-be that Paevey’s performance not be a dead giveaway about the impostor in the mix. “I would ask, ‘Do you want me to pepper a little bit of Cassius in here?’ And the answer was always, ‘No, just be Nathan,”’ he reports. “So for the most part, it was basically just ‘Nathan minus Maxie [Kirsten Storms, the real Nathan’s wife].’ It was maybe a little bit of a coarser Nathan, but still Nathan. It wasn’t until really recently that I’ve gotten to do Cassius, and now it’s, ‘You’re just Cassius now unless people are calling you Nathan, and then you just act like Nathan.’ Now the transition is that there is a group of people on the canvas that know who I am and a group of people from whom still I’m trying to hide my identity.”
As identical twins, Cassius and Nathan look alike and sound alike, but is that where the similarities end? That’s the question GH will be answering as the story unfolds. “In the weeks to come, obviously more stuff is going to be learned about this person, who is kind of Nathan, kind of not,” notes Paevey. “Some of the things you learn are less than savory, shall we say, but he’s not a bad guy in the way that Faison is a bad guy.”
Paevey is having a blast digging into the Cassius role. “It’s been cool to get to do something new,” he says. “It’s definitely a little interesting right out of the gate because Cullum [Andrew Hawkes] and Sidwell [Carlo Rota] are my superiors, and when the audience is introduced to Cassius as a person who is connected to them, he’s sort of getting brought to task by his boss. So it’s not necessarily a big, grand reveal that I’m a big bad, it’s that I’m a henchman for the organization and I’m not holding up my end of the bargain.”
As a bonus, the twist has him working more closely with Carlo Rota. “He is one of the coolest human beings I’ve ever met in my life,” the actor raves. “He has got to be the most interesting man in the world! That guy is awesome and totally hysterical.”
Paevey teases, “I do think that the Cassius arc has been interesting … I can’t say that much about what’s coming down the pike, but there’s all kinds of crazy stuff coming when we actually do get more into the Cassius stuff — like, actual Cassius, free from the scrutiny of his superiors and free from scrutiny of the people on the other side who suspect that maybe he’s Nathan, maybe he’s not. It’s been fun! Cassius is basically Nathan turned on his heels. He has to be similar enough to Nathan that it’s feasible, that it’s believable that people were fooled. He looks like Nathan, he kind of sounds like Nathan — the camouflage is viable, so to speak. I mean, we are twins. But there are some differences.”
Careful What You Wish For
From a nature vs. nurture perspective, “Nathan’s upbringing and Cassius’s upbringing were wildly different,” Paevey points out. “Nathan had a family. He grew up to be a good man. He took care of his people. I feel like Cassius, on the other hand, has kind of the little brother syndrome. He did not grow up in a warm and loving family. He’s never really been like loved or appreciated or seen or anything like that.”
Which is potentially going to be tricky for Cassius to navigate as he starts to grow attached to the life he’s living as Nathan. “I think in the beginning, taking over his brother’s identity was really just kind of a means to an end,” offers Paevey. “It’s eminently useful to be somebody that everybody loves. He’s a cop. He has access. His motivation, initially, was utility, because being someone that’s known and loved by the community, that’s really useful if you’re a nefarious guy, if you’re trying to do stuff and get away with it. There’s all kinds of utility to being Nathan, to hiding in plain sight as a detective. But there are some other perks that go along with it. What I think he didn’t foresee was how nice it was to be liked, you know?
“There’s a little bit of a Grinch story here,” continues the actor, “where he puts on Nathan’s clothes and dons the persona and everybody starts treating him like Nathan and Cassius has never had anybody treat him like that before. Everybody loved Nathan, and Cassius has never experienced that. I think that the way that people treated him as Nathan really opened Cassius’s eyes to, ‘This is nice! I’ll be Nathan as long as I can. I don’t wanna go back to being me. This is better.”
As his ruse continues and Cassius-as-Nathan forges an even deeper bond with Nathan’s little boy, James (Gary James Fuller), and new love interest, Lulu, his attachment to his alter ego could prove to be one heck of an Achilles’ heel. Paevey observes, “There are now people that he cares about, and I think that’s a great point of vulnerability for Cassius, because he’s never really had to worry about that before. It’s always kind of been him versus the world, but now there are people that he cares about — and he only gets to keep them if the secret holds.”
Conversation
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