INTERVIEW
General Hospital’s Laura Wright Dishes Carly’s Surprise Alliance With Valentin (Exclusive)
On the October 22 episode of General Hospital, it became abundantly clear why Carly wanted Spinelli’s (Bradford Anderson) help creating an identity that would stand up to intense scrutiny: Claiming to be attorney Barbara Saunders, she sneaked into Steinmauer, the maximum security prison where Valentin (James Patrick Stuart) is serving time. Soap Opera Digest checked in with Carly’s portrayer, Laura Wright, about the fun storyline twist and getting to mix it up with Stuart.
Spies Like Us
Carly has been on the warpath ever since Jason blabbed to her that her daughter, Josslyn, is working for the WSB — and that her lover, Jack Brennan (Chris McKenna) recruited her for the job and has been lying to Carly’s face for months. She’s determined to do whatever it takes to safely extract Joss from the WSB’s clutches and make Brennan regret the day he ever crossed her … even team up with a Cassadine!
Wright, who began her daytime career back in 1991 when she was cast as Ally Rescott on Loving, first became pals with Stuart in those early soap days, when he was playing Will Cortlandt on All My Children. Stuart recalled the origins of their friendship to Digest back in 2016, noting, “Laura Wright, I knew as Laura Sisk [her maiden name]. Kelly [Ripa, ex-Hayley, AMC, with whom Stuart worked closely on the show] and Laura were really close and I remember we would go on dates, we’d go to concerts, we’d go to the China Club, we’d go to Saturday Night Live. We were all just goofy kids having fun in the city.”
Given their long off-camera history, Wright was thrilled when she found out that they’d be in story together. “I was excited!” she says. “I love the idea of working with James. I love him. He’s funny and hilarious and great to work with, so I just love it.”
She is looking forward to getting to share more scenes with Stuart now that their characters are on a mutual mission to destroy Brennan. “We have a lot of stuff coming up together that’s going to be absolutely hilarious and very intense and emotional,” she enthuses. “I mean, some of the stuff we have coming up is going to be amazing. It’s really amazing material.”
Just how unlikely an alliance between Carly and Valentin makes it that much more fun for the actors, to hear Wright tell it. “What we love about it is that the fans are not going to see that coming,” she explained. “No one would ever expect these two to be in cahoots together,” especially after Carly wound up hospitalized earlier this year after ingesting champagne that Valentin had laced with poison (a botched attempt on Valentin’s part to kill Brennan). “I mean, hello!” chuckles Wright. “I almost died of polonium poisoning because of him! And don’t worry,” she adds. “Those things come up [in their scenes] — don’t think we’re forgetting those things!”
Carly being so bold as to lie her way into a maximum security prison overseas for her first meeting with Valentin tracks for Wright, who offers, “It makes sense to me, 100 percent, because this is Carly. If she wants to do it, she’s going to figure out a way to do it, and this is the only way Carly knows how to do it! Carly doesn’t know how how to go through the right channels. Carly just starts spiraling and she’s going to handle it her way and she doesn’t care what anyone thinks, right? That’s just what Carly does!”
But she may well find herself in over her head. The actress points out, “She is playing in a world she knows nothing about, and no one knows she’s doing it. No one. So this is going to be a very interesting game that she’s playing because she’s doing Carly things in a very big world, a world that’s way bigger than Port Charles. She’s playing in the spy world, and as Valentin at one point tells her, ‘If Jack finds out what you’re doing, he could make you disappear.'”
Given the high stakes, secrecy becomes key. While keeping things from Jason is not Carly’s go-to move, Wright reasons, “If she tells Jason, he’s going to tell her to stop talking to Valentin. Carly knows that everyone’s going to try and shut this down, and she doesn’t want anyone to stop her from her plan. It’s like, ‘I’ll apologize to Jason later. He’s not stopping me from doing this!'” Referencing how long Jason took to tell her about Joss’s WSB ties after returning from Croatia, she jokes in character, “I might wait a month. ‘Jason, you didn’t tell me for a month!'”
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