General Hospital Head Writers Reveal Why They Made Drew Cain a Villain (Exclusive)
General Hospital once knew former Navy SEAL Drew Cain (Cameron Mathison) as a morally upstanding hero — but after serving time for insider trading in 2023, he began to undergo a personality shift so severe that today, he is arguably the most despised man in Port Charles. What was behind the decision to transform Drew into a villain? Soap Opera Digest got the inside scoop from GH’s head writers, Elizabeth Korte and Chris Van Etten.
Why GH’s Drew Went From Hero to Villain
“I think there are a number of things that played into it,” says Chris Van Etten. “From my point of view, the Quartermaine family, which is so integral to the show’s composition, thrives when there is conflict within it. And in the past, we found conflict from Edward [John Ingle], from Tracy [Jane Elliot, from A.J. [Sean Kanan] — but I think that the family had lost that element, especially as Tracy had stepped up to really become the pinnacle, the head of the family.”
With Edward having passed away in 2012, A.J. dying courtesy of a bullet from Sonny Corinthos (Maurice Benard) in 2014, and Tracy ascending to matriarch, the role of Quartermaine black sheep was up for grabs — and Drew became what the writers saw as the obvious candidate.
Drew — the son of the late Alan Quartermaine (Stuart Damon) and his mistress, Susan Moore (Gail Ramsey) and Jason Morgan’s (Steve Burton) twin brother — didn’t learn that he was a Quartermaine until 2017. Van Etten explains, “Drew, to me, seemed positioned best, as a newcomer to the family and as a relative outsider within it — and with a really blank slate of a past — to step into the role as an antagonist, or an adversary from within.”
“The Quartermaines needed an A.J.,” concurs Elizabeth Korte. “They needed an Alan. And Drew was ideally positioned.”
In Korte’s view, it was Drew’s affair with Willow Tait (Katelyn MacMullen) — who was married to Drew’s nephew, Michael Corinthos (Rory Gibson), when they first hit the sheets — that really solidified Drew’s reputation as a villain, and as a persona non grata within his family of origin.
In Korte’s view, Drew’s affair with his nephew Michael Corinthos’ (Rory Gibson) wife, Willow Tait (Katelyn MacMullen), that truly cemented his status as a villain and made him persona non grata within his own family.
“When it comes to Drew as a character, what we did was really lean into what was already established about that character, which is, yes, he has quite a heroic bent — but he also likes to see himself as a hero. So as he got deeper [into his involvement] with Willow,” earning the disgust from the Quartermaines in the process, “his take was always going to be that he was not a bad guy, that he was heroic. He really leaned into her hero worship of him.”
The Drew of today is certainly a dramatic departure from the kindly amnesiac the late Billy Miller began playing in 2014, but, as Korte sees it, his downfall “arose out of intrinsic character traits.”
Though Willow’s Drew-sized blinders remained in place for a good long while, she did, in the end, see his true colors, leading her both to shoot him and to inject him with a paralytic that kept him in a locked-in state for months.
And though they are now divorced, she got to keep both her freedom and his congressional seat in the deal, in exchange for keeping quiet about his own illegal financial dealings.
Drew, meanwhile, shows no signs of slowing down his villainy, most recently framing Willow’s mother, Nina Reeves (Cynthia Watros), for the disappearance of WSB Agent Jack Brennan (Chris McKenna) and working with Ava Jerome (Maura West) to frame Sonny for the violent assault on Sidwell (Carlo Rota) and Curtis Ashford (Donnell Turner) at Pentonville.
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