GH Exclusive: Eden McCoy Is ‘Super-Stoked’ About Joss’s New Life In The WSB

Spies Like Us: Eden McCoy on the GH set with Bryce Durfee, who plays Josslyn’s WSB mentor, Vaughn.

When Eden McCoy sat down for a chat with General Hospital‘s powers-that-be last fall, she was in for quite the download about what the show had in store for her character, Josslyn Jacks. “Dex dies, I kill Cyrus, and then I become a spy,” she sums up. “That’s the plotline that I was told months and months ago, so you can imagine my excitement for everything that was going to be coming up!”

Peer Pleasure

A few months into her new GH life as a Port Charles university student by day, secret agent by night, McCoy says she’s having a blast working opposite Chris McKenna, the actor whose alter ego, Jack Brennan, first brought her character into the WSB sphere. “Chris is amazing!” she declares. “He’s a super-nice dude. I worked with him on his first day a lot, because we were shooting things out of order. He had so much dialogue that day, I don’t even have the words to explain how much. And not only did he have so much dialogue, but it was the most complex, complicated stuff you could possibly imagine. When I was reading the script the night before we had to shoot it, I remember thinking, ‘They’re giving him all of this on his first day?! This is so gnarly!’ ”

How McKenna handled the challenge quickly made McCoy a fan of his. “He just powered through it,” she says. “He was such a team player. It was his first day of having to adjust to how we shoot, the pace we shoot, the camera angles we use, how to get your coverage, the fact that you only get one take. I’m sure it was overwhelming for him, but he just stayed as calm and collected as possible and was just like, ‘Wow, this is crazy, what you guys have been doing here.’ I told him, ‘Look, if you can make it through today, you can make it through any day!’ ”

Since then, “I’ve been working with him nearly every day,” McCoy reports. “And he has just been so lovely. It’s so nice to have somebody so warm and comfortable and sweet to share so much material with. We definitely have a big journey together coming up.”

The actress says that across the board, her castmates have been excited by the twist of Joss becoming a spy. “Everyone has been super-excited and supportive. Laura [Wright, Carly] thinks it’s great because she just loves good story; that’s the most important thing to her. She was excited for me because for the past few years, Josslyn has just been this girl that can’t understand how people in her life kill people, and Josslyn no longer has that excuse!”

After a whirlwind trip through WSB training, Josslyn is now back in Port Charles — where her mom, Carly, has started sleeping with Brennan, unaware that he’s enlisted her daughter to become an agent. McCoy predicts, “She is one million percent going to kill him” when she finds out. “I’m so excited for that, but I’m sure [the writers] are going to save that for as long as they possibly can [laughs]!”

Career Pivot

McCoy acknowledges that Joss’s shift from undergrad to WSB asset “is a very large jump. Josslyn has no experience in anything in that world. But at the same time, this is a young woman who clearly has no idea what she wants to do in life. She has gone from wanting to be a doctor to not wanting to be a doctor, to wanting to be an environmental scientist, and the character of Brennan was brilliant in [selling her on joining the WSB] because he knows that. He knows where she’s at in life, and he framed joining the WSB as a real career that makes an actual difference in people’s lives and in the safety of the world. I think that was brilliant because it plays to Josslyn’s insecurity about having no idea what she wants to do and feeling so lost. He kind of presents to her this silver platter of, ‘You can have this exciting life.’ But obviously, the struggle is everything that comes with that, which is that nobody in Josslyn’s life can ever know. Not anyone, from her mom to Jason to Trina. So now, from here on out, there are sacrifices of lying to everybody in her life and losing relationships of honesty, and realizing how lonesome this career is going to be because she can’t share anything about her real life.”

Just as Josslyn has had to cultivate new skills under the tutelage of instructor/handler Vaughn, McCoy says that one of her favorite things about Joss’s professional pivot is the work that she has had to do behind the scenes to believably portray her character’s new circumstances. “I’m doing a lot of my own research, and I haven’t really had an opportunity to learn so many other things for a part,” she notes. “Especially on General Hospital, because my character’s been written so close to my personal life, strangely enough. Now, it’s like an entire new world that Eden would have absolutely zero concept or idea of. That’s been interesting to experience and to do training outside of the show for things I have to perform. That’s always been a big dream of mine. One of the reasons why I wanted to be an actor was to be able to learn different skills that I would have never learned, and that gets to happen now, which is really fun.”

The actress is grateful for the chance to switch things up as she approaches the 10th anniversary of her debut as Josslyn, which is coming up in October. “I’m super-stoked because it’s been almost a decade of playing the same person, and the boredom hits,” she admits. “And then it turns into something so new, and you get an opportunity presented to you where you literally have no idea what you’re doing and that’s my favorite thing ever, because it’s a challenge.”

One aspect of the secrecy surrounding Joss’s new career that doesn’t thrill her? Its implications for Joss’s relationship with her best friend and roommate, Trina. “I definitely don’t enjoy all of the lying she has to do with Trina,” McCoy says. “But it’s all out of protection and love. I mean, Josslyn’s choice is, ‘You tell Trina and something bad could happen to her, or you don’t tell Trina and you keep her safe.’ That’s the way that Josslyn has to think about things now.”

Training Days: Josslyn at the WSB facility with Brennan (Chris McKenna).