Steve Burton’s Five Greatest GH Moments
Steve Burton debuted on GENERAL HOSPITAL as straight-laced, aspiring doctor Jason Quartermaine, the pride and joy of his wealthy family. Then, a brain injury transformed him into mob man Jason Morgan. Needless to say, it’s been an interesting and unforgettable ride. “It’s the emotional stuff that you do that sticks with you,” says Burton. “Like when Monica had cancer and Amber Tamblyn came on the show as Emily. That whole story was very good.” Now, Burton shares his five most memorable Jason moments.
SONNY DAYS
“Working with Maurice (Benard, Sonny) changed everything for me as an actor. I was coming to the end of my first contract, and Maurice had just gotten on the show a couple of months before. He was working five days a week. Everyone was like, ‘Who’s this new guy?’ I hadn’t talked to him much. I wasn’t really friends with him. We weren’t in the same story. Then, he came up to me and said, ‘You’ve got something. I see something in there. You can act. It’s in your gut.’ We started talking about acting. I told Maurice that I didn’t have a technique, so to speak, on how to work, break down scripts, and stuff like that. I asked him to help me and he said he would. It came around the same time they wanted to change my story, change me into Jason Morgan. So it worked out perfectly. I would go to Maurice’s house and we’d rehearse our stuff. It was really an intense acting school, because we would do it every day. Then I started working with him and we started our story. Maurice taught me how to break down a scene, a lot of method stuff and sense memory stuff. He taught me a lot about acting.
OH, BABY!
“That whole year before Kimberly McCullough (Robin) left the show (in 1997) was great. The story was awesome, and everyone was on their game. Robin [revealed the] truth that Michael wasn’t Jason’s kid; then, Jason and Robin broke up and she left for Paris. There are stories that start defining a character, and this was one of them.”
HONEYMOON IN VEGAS
“Vanessa Marcil (ex-Brenda) and I always had fun working together. We always joked around and stuff. She’s cool. We have a mutual respect for each other and [there’s a feeling of] safety there, because we worked together in the beginning when we were kids. That was 15 years ago. Now we’ve grown up. Our working relationship really got strong when she came back (in 1998), and Brenda and Jason got married. It just worked. We had a good little story for a couple of months and that wedding in Las Vegas. The situation was funny. I mean, Joe Isuzu married us! Putting Jason in those situations is funny, because you know how much he hates that stuff.”
THE GREATEST LOVE
“[The writers] weren’t sure what they were going to do with Sam and Jason in the beginning. Kelly (Monaco) and I started working together, when Jason started taking care of Sam because she was pregnant. Then it blossomed; it bloomed into something that was a great story. Sam and Jason became friends, then they became lovers. It was a good, emotional story the way it all played out with Sam losing her baby.”
OH, BROTHER!
“No one was expecting this Spinelli thing to catch on. I mean, who could have known how this kid would have worked out with Jason and Lulu? Who would have thought that, at the end of the day, Jason would end up being kind of his big brother? If you had told me that before he came on, I would have said, ‘You’re crazy!’ If I’d had seen Bradford Anderson at the audition, I would have been like, ‘Get this freak out of here!’ But you get lucky sometimes. Jason’s friendship with Spinelli is definitely at the top of my list. That’s No. 1.”
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