Turning Up the Heat With GH’s Carly
Laura Wright has been working hard to keep up with Carly’s hectic storylines on GENERAL HOSPITAL, which right now finds her and Jax at yet another crossroads. Here, Wright talks about the rewards of being on the front burner…
Soap Opera Weekly: Are you glad your real life is not as screwy as Carly’s right now?
Laura Wright: Would I want to live Carly’s life? Hell, no (laughs)! But getting to play it — as an actor, all these different emotions and levels and destructiveness and unhealthiness? It’s awesome.
Weekly: Because it’s an acting challenge?
Wright: Because art imitates life, and there are a lot of people out there who do a lot of unhealthy things. I love playing it as an actor, because I don’t care to be happy and boring and not work. I like to dig down deep and do the ugly stuff.
Weekly: Rewarding as it is, it must be tough to play these dark emotions, right?
Wright: It really has been the most difficult, yet rewarding, storyline I’ve ever done. I just dug in with everything that I had.
Weekly: Do you get a lot of support from your co-stars?
Wright: The people that I work with have been just [great]. I love Ingo [Rademacher, Jax]. I always tell the writers, “Don’t really break us up. Just give us tons of problems.” He’s a joy to spend a day with. Steve Burton [Jason] is such a supportive actor; he really has been great. And Maurice [Benard, Sonny] — it’s like playing tennis with him. We don’t really map things out, you know? Ingo and I can run lines, and I kind of know with Steve how things will play out, because we know Carly and Jason’s relationship so well. But the most dysfunctional relationship being Sonny and Carly, you don’t really know what’s going to set one off. They can push buttons and trigger things with each other that even they don’t realize. When I work on scenes with Maurice, things happen that we didn’t even think were part of the scene; emotions and stuff come out. I do have to say that working with the three of them through this has been so rewarding and fun and challenging.
Weekly: Megan Ward‘s Kate is a new foil for Carly…
Wright: I love Megan. I could work with her all day long.
Weekly: Of course, there has to be something on the page for you to play.
Wright: I just thank Bob Guza for writing this story, which has been such a gift to play.
Weekly: If you were writing the scripts, what would you like to see happen to Carly?
Wright: I think now it would be interesting if she does turn up pregnant — a surprise pregnancy — instead of having it planned, and with fertility drugs and stuff like that. I think what has to happen is — at the most unlikely time — you find out she’s pregnant.
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