General Hospital Exclusive: Van Hansis on Lucas’s Risky Mission to Avenge Marco
Lucas’s grief over the brutal murder of his boyfriend, Marco Rios (Adrian Anchondo), took on a new dimension in the April 1 episode of General Hospital, when he deduced who the killer was: Ross Cullum (Andrew Hawkes), whose life Lucas was saving on the operating table at the very moment Marco took his last breath. Soap Opera Digest spoke to Lucas’s portrayer, Van Hansis, about how this realization fuels his character’s rather risky efforts to avenge Marco’s death.
Man with a Plan
Hansis says that GH’s writers deserve big kudos for having Lucas be the one to save Cullum. “I loved that twist,” he enthuses. “Lucas already felt guilt,” as he blamed himself for involving Marco in the scheme to get Britt’s (Kelly Thiebaud) medication out of the Wyndemere safe, which is what sent Cullum gunning — er, knifing — for him. “But this compounds the guilt, because the guy that killed Marco would be dead if it wasn’t for Lucas.”
The scenes in which Lucas put the Marco-Cullum connection together, he notes, were critical to the next arc of his character’s journey. “It’s a definitive moment for Lucas and for the story,” he declares. “At least the way I read the scene and played the scene, it becomes a full-on panic attack. I deal with anxiety and I’ve had many panic attacks in my life, and as anybody who has them knows, it’s horrible. But that’s when all of the you-know-what hits the fan. It’s like a thunderclap hits Lucas. That realization completely shakes him to his core, and that’s when he decides to turn and try to go after Sidwell [Carlo Rota] and Cullum.”
Determined that Marco’s death ultimately mean something, Lucas resolves to make the men responsible for it pay. Explains Hansis, “Lucas has a one-track mind and he very much feels like he owes it to Marco to get justice. Again, he has that guilt of having brought Marco into this whole ‘get Britt’s medicine’ thing, which in Lucas’s mind was because Marco needed to prove to him that he was a good person, coming out of that big fight they had,” after Lucas eavesdropped on Marco and Sidwell (Carlo Rota) and realized that Marco was not as squeaky-clean as he had led Lucas to believe. “When Lucas told him, ‘You’re not the person I thought you were,’ Marco was like, ‘I’ll change, I’ll change!’ And Lucas was like, ‘Okay, here’s how you can change’ — and Marco died trying to implement that change. So Lucas feels like he has to repay Marco for what he did, and he’s got a one-track mind about it.”
In the April 2 episode, Lucas was determined to confront Sidwell —Marco’s grieving father and Cullum’s partner — but ultimately let the man convince him to remain at Wyndemere so they could help each other through the mourning process. Lucas, of course, has a hidden agenda. “When Sidwell invites him to stay at Wyndermere, Lucas agrees because it’s sort of a ‘keep your enemies closer’ thing because he wants to get that evidence to bring Sidwell and Cullum down for what they did. While Cullum killed Marco, Lucas holds Sidwell partially responsible for bringing Marco into this dangerous world in the first place.”
Now Lucas is navigating that dangerous world himself. “I think it becomes pretty clear to him pretty soon that he is in danger,” teases Hansis. “But I also feel like he’s not going to stop. There is no backing down from getting Marco the justice he deserves.”
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