GH Exclusive: Dominic Zamprogna Says Dante And Lulu Need ‘A Lot Of Repair’
The General Hospital shockwaves over discovering that Gio is his son — the result of the teenage pregnancy Brook Lynn concealed from him for 22 years — continue to unfold for Dante Falconeri, and on the Thursday, May 29, episode, he unleashed his outrage over being kept in the dark upon his ex-wife, Lulu. (Not only did Lulu fail to clue him in when she got proof that Brook Lynn had given birth to his child, or alert him to her mounting suspicions that Gio was that child, but her chatter about it backstage at the Nurses’ Ball is what revealed the truth to Gio.) Things got so ugly that by the end of the hour, not only was a reconciliation off the table, but so, too, was them even being friends in addition to co-parents to their son, Rocco. Soap Opera Digest got the inside scoop from Dominic Zamprogna (Dante) about his on-screen chemistry with Alexa Havins (Lulu), Dante’s complex feelings for Lulu and whether “Lante” is really over for good.
It’s Complicated
Before Alexa Havins joined the GH cast last fall, Zamprogna has worked closely with the two previous Lulus, Julie Marie Berman and Emme Rylan. Despite having no history with the actress as she took on a role his character had tons of history with, Zamprogna says that building a rapport with Havins “has been easy. Alexa is a phenomenal actor and so great to work with. She’s very soulful and honest and subtle, which are all things that I just naturally and instinctively respond to well. I felt, pretty much from day one, that there’s just a natural chemistry between us. It doesn’t feel like we have to try for anything or force anything. If anything, it’s the opposite! We almost have to really try not to play into it, I find — which is an awesome problem to have, knowing that there’s something there that you can just pluck out of the air when you need it.”
Just a few weeks before the Gio secret blew up, Dante and Lulu were having an intense conversation of an entirely different sort, as the exes admitted that they still love each other. “I find that really interesting, that all of this kind of reactionary behavior happened on the heels of him telling her he loves her,” Zamprogna offers. “We’ve all done and said things we regret, and it’s not that he regrets [telling her he loves her], but I think it makes him feel a tremendous amount of guilt — the old Catholic guilt! He does love her; he never didn’t love her. But he fell in love with someone else,” his late fiancée, Sam McCall, “and that raises the question, can you be in love with more than one person at a time?”
Given the relative recency of Lulu’s emergence from her years-long coma and of Sam’s murder, Zamprogna thinks Dante jumped the gun a little bit, possibly giving Lulu false hope. “I don’t know if Dante knows whether he’s in love with her or just loves her,” he explains. “He’s just trying to figure it out, but saying those words … He blurts them out, but does he feel them? When someone you love is telling you how much they love you, or showing you how much they love you, it’s really hard not to say it back to them. But should you? Maybe not, you know? So I think he maybe carries a little bit of that guilt forward with him. It’s not that he doesn’t mean it, but maybe he shouldn’t have said it, because maybe that puts the person on the receiving end in an unfair position. You don’t ever want to be accused of leading someone on, and I think the moment he said that to her, he realized, ‘Ah, s—t, I shouldn’t have said that.’ He doesn’t retract it, but he said, ‘We can’t do anything because I’m still in love with [Sam].’ I mean, she’s got a piece of Sam inside her,” as Sam donated part of her liver to Lulu prior to her death. “It’s a little complicated!” the actor chuckles.
There were bigger fish to fry after Dante’s potentially ill-advised declaration — first Rocco’s hospitalization, then the Gio discovery. And before Dante had much of a chance to grapple with the true nature of his feelings for Lulu, their relationship dynamics underwent the major shift that came with him learning how much Lulu had been concealing from him on the Brook Lynn/Gio front. “It’s a serious betrayal on her part,” Zamprogna says. “He doesn’t really see the positive spin she tries to put on it about protecting his best interests. It sounds more to him like her hate for Brook Lynn is so strong that she’ll go to any length to try and screw her over. He is super-angry with her, and right now, nothing she says is going to convince him that she had good intentions. And so Dante is kind of ready to maybe not have her be a part of his daily life going forward.”
Of course, that’s in the heat of the moment — and once the scorching emotional temperature has some time to cool off, staying mad at Lulu — a woman he loved enough to marry twice — may prove enormously challenging for Dante. “Like I said, he definitely loves her,” Zamprogna affirms. But mending their broken trust won’t be easy. “It’s gonna take a lot of repair,” the actor sums up.
Go It Alone: For now, at least, Dante and Lulu (Alexa Havins) will be leading separate lives.
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