ABC
I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends: Van Hansis (Lucas) praises GH co-star Rebecca Herbst (Elizabeth) with helping him feel at ease when playing doctor.
Van Hansis had to dive into the deep end portraying Lucas’s doctor side on General Hospital, as the first in-character medical crisis he fielded was the death of Lucas’s on-screen sister, Sam (Kelly Monaco).
Med Alert
The actor tells Soap Opera Digest, “As an actor, you have certain types [of characters] that you go out for a lot; you kind of have your niche. For me, I’ve auditioned for doctors, but I would say that a doctor or a lawyer or whatever is maybe not the obvious choice for me. So, being cast as one, I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is going to stretch my muscles.’ ”
When Hansis first met with the show’s executive producer, Frank Valentini, over Zoom while he was being considered for the role, “One of the things Frank asked me was, ‘So, how are you medically?’ And I thought he meant, like, [how was my health]! Thank God I didn’t say this, but I was almost like, ‘Well, I tore my meniscus a couple of years ago, but besides that, I feel good [laughs].’ But then I realized he meant, like, ‘How are you with medical jargon?’ And he explained, ‘[I’m asking] because you’d be a doctor.’ ”
Hansis worked hard to nail the first GH scripts that came his way that were heavy on medical terms. “There are certain actors who go out for doctors all the time and by the nature of that being in their wheelhouse, they can do that type of dialogue,” he says. “For me, when that day came along, I was looking up [the terminology] — I literally had a spreadsheet of all the terms that I needed to say and what they all meant. And I enjoy it because it’s such a learning experience. There was a film I did where I worked for NASA, and this is kind of the same thing — in order to know what you’re talking about, you’ve got to know what you’re talking about! And to look up all of this stuff was really cool.”
He feels that his prep work paid off. “I think I did well with it. I felt good about it and people [on set] said I did a good job with it. After my doctoring [scenes], one of the camera guys was even like, ‘So, did you do this on your previous show [As The World Turns, where he played Luke Snyder].’ And I was like, ‘On my previous show, I played a 16-year-old!’ Like, ‘No, I didn’t have any medical jargon there!’ ”
Learning From The Best
Hansis says that he was grateful to have Rebecca Herbst, who plays G.H.’s head nurse, Elizabeth Webber-Baldwin, in the mix during his doctoring debut. “She is so great,” he raves. “When we did those scenes, I was like, ‘Does this lady actually have, like, a PhD?!’ Because she seemed to know how to do all of the medical stuff and she was literally telling me what to do, helping me out. We had an actual nurse there who was helping us [as a medical advisor to make sure the scenes were performed realistically], but she didn’t need any help! She knew how to hold everything, she knew what every [piece of equipment] did. But also, just her energy is so calm, so chill — good vibes, you know? And especially being a new cast member, that’s such a great thing to have, that grounding presence of somebody who can take a really potentially stressful situation like joining a show, not really knowing anything or anybody, and just make it really calm, in the best way.”
The actor is thrilled to be enmeshed in story with Herbst. “When we had our first scene, she had mentioned to me that Lucas and Elizabeth knew each other, but hadn’t had a lot of story together. When I was on ATWT, I was in the younger crowd, and I didn’t really actually work that much with, say, Jen Landon [ex-Gwen]; I was in different stories. And I’m happy that since I’ve been playing Lucas, she and I have been working a lot together, and it’s been really, really fun.”
