Disney/Ricky Middlesworth
Friday, November 1 marked Kelly Monaco’s final episode as Sam McCall. Her run kicked off on October 1, 2003, with dialogue that included these fortuitous lines: “What I’m about to do, it ain’t going to be boring.” As the superstar’s time in the fictional world of Port Charles comes to an end, Soap Opera Digest takes a look back at what Monaco has had to say to us about her General Hospital experience through the years. (For a detailed timeline of her storylines as Sam, click here.)
Start Your Engines
Monaco’s daytime carer began three years before her GH debut, when she was cast as Livvie Locke on Port Charles in 2000. The breakout role (which became a dual role when she also began playing Tess, a supernaturally derived version of Livvie) put Monaco on the map, and cemented Monaco’s passion for working in the soap genre. In the spring of 2003, she told Digest, “I love my job. I love being here every day, I love the schedule…. You don’t have a life when you’re doing this show, but that keeps me going. Some people work to live and some people live to work — I live to work. If I’m in a full day’s worth of scenes, I don’t come out of my dressing room. I’ll be running lines until I’m called [to set].”
The actress was not looking to add another soap to her résumé, but finding another gig became a necessity when ABC canceled PC on June 27, 2003. She recalled to Digest in 2018, “I remember where I was when I got the phone call that Port Charles was being canceled. And mind you, we shot six months on, six months off, so we had already [shot episodes] through October or November or something. It was in the summer when I got the phone call and I was devastated. I loved that show so much. It was my start. I didn’t know if I would ever work again, you know? I was so young still and I was so new to the soap opera business, I wasn’t sure if I had resonated in the soap opera world.”
She worried for nothing, as she quickly found out. “Within, I would say, half an hour of finding out that the show had been canceled, I had gotten a call from each of the networks, wanting to pitch me,” she marveled. “And ironically, Frank [Valentini, GH’s executive producer, who was then at the helm of One Life to Live] was one of them… Frank called me at my parents’ house in the Poconos and said, ‘We would love to have you on One Life to Live, I think you’re amazing.’ This was after a couple of other calls had come in, and I was just blown away that I had maybe made a little mark in the daytime world.”
Scott Garfield/ABC
Moncao as PC’s Livvie oppsite Michael Easton as Caleb.
A Seamless Transition
Despite the other execs’ best efforts to court her, jumping at the opportunity to join GH was a no-brainer to Monaco, who had been a fan of the show as a kid, thanks to her mother’s loyal viewership. “General Hospital, to me, was like, ‘If I am going to do [another soap], this is what I want to do,’ ” Monaco explained in her 2018 chat with Digest. In 2023, she recalled to Digest that after GH created the character of Sam for her and she began work on the show, which taped in the same studio lot as PC, “It was seamless and it was awesome and beautiful and intimidating and I was scared s—tless, but I did it! And I’m so glad that I did.”
Monaco didn’t know much about the show’s plans for Sam at the time. She noted to Digest in 2023, “They told me loosely that she would be sort of a con artist, a grifter, rough and tumble. And I was like, ‘Perfect, that’s me to a T!’ Like, ‘That’s not gonna be that hard to pull off!’ I thought, ‘How fun! I get to play a badass chick.’ ”
The actress acknowledged some growing pains when it came to the audience’s acceptance of Sam. “I always say, in the beginning, Sam was a bad girl with good intentions,” Monaco mused. “In the beginning, [that] was really difficult for me, because the audience, they love to have a villain and I essentially was a villain coming on the show.”
Sam was originally romantically linked to the character of Jax, played by Ingo Rademacher. “We’ve been friends for a very long time, since 1997, I believe, so it was comfortable when I first came on,” Monaco told us in 2018. Far less comfortable was knowing that Sam would soon become a threat to the Carly/Sonny relationship when Sam and Sonny became lovers. She admitted, “Maurice Benard [Sonny] scared the living daylights out of me! I was probably shaking in our first scenes. He’s so not intimidating at all — he’s so welcoming and comforting — but I just saw Maurice, you know? An icon. A legend!”
In 2005, Monaco was cast in the first season of ABC’s Dancing With The Stars, becoming the series’ first mirrorball winner. Monaco reflected in her 2023 chat with Digest, “I feel like the turning point for me with the audience — for me not to get hate from the audience — was after I did Dancing With The Stars two or three years in. People saw me, Kelly, and got to know me, and they were able to differentiate between me and the character. I swear to you, from the first airing of Dancing With The Stars, almost overnight, it was a switch in support, because then I wasn’t Sam, the person who broke up Sonny and Carly, the person who slept with Jax — they actually saw me as, ‘Oh, that’s Kelly over here, and that’s the character she plays over there.’ Breaking the fourth wall, sometimes that works out badly for people, but for me, it worked in my favor, and I think I was able to gain some respect from the audience and they didn’t think I was, like, this trashy whore who was sleeping with her stepfather [laughs].”
Monaco also felt a huge shift in fans’ goodwill toward Sam when, in 2004, Sam’s baby girl with Sonny was stillborn. “That’s when Sam became really vulnerable, really real,” she pointed out in 2023. “I think it changed how the viewers saw me as an actor and saw the character. It kind of humanized her; you knew she had a heart, and her heart was bleeding into the audience.” The story made a deep emotional impact on the audience, and was a landmark for Monaco as an actress, as well. In 2018, she shared, “I didn’t even know what I was doing, really. I wasn’t a trained actor. It was a scary place, a scary Band-Aid to rip off, and I got to rip it off on camera, really. I think so many people connected to that storyline and it really changed the course of who Sam McCall was, not with Jason, not with Sonny, not with anyone, but as herself. I think it was the first time she had been relatable. It goes down as one of my favorite storylines because it was so personal and healing. I knew that there would be many young girls and women who would be able to relate to that story and the loss.”
ABC/TOM QUEALLY
Jason (Steve Burton) was there for Sam as she mourned the loss of her child.
The “JaSam” Era
The loss of the baby was devastating to Sam, but also brought her closer to Jason. The romance of Sam and Jason — “JaSam” to their fans — was one of the show’s most popular pairings for years. “It was pretty magical,” Monaco told Digest in 2023. “With Steve [Burton, ex-Jason], our natural chemistry together as actors translated really well on screen, and everyone — the writers, the producers, the directors and the actors — worked to be able to form that unconditional love that the characters had for each other. I’ve had multiple relationships on the show, but ultimately, in my mind, Sam and Jason were always the end game. In their love for each other, no affairs or other relationships or time apart or whatever could ever have come between them.”
While Jason and Sam were falling in love, Sam’s life was changing on other fronts. In 2006, the show scripted the then-shocking twist that Sam was the biological daughter of Nancy Lee Grahn’s Alexis Davis, while also made her the big sister to Kristina and Molly. Known collectively as “the Davis girls,” their female-power family dynamic was a hit with fans. “I can relate to the Davis girls because I have four sisters; I’m one of all girls,” Monaco reflected to Digest in 2023. “I think it’s a really special bond when you have sisters. There’s a lot of story to be told there that’s so juicy and meaty because it’s relatable, and that’s always what we want on screen; we want to watch something that we can relate to.”
Not only that, but Sam made a career pivot, getting licensed as a private detective and opening a firm, McCall and Jackal Private Investigations, with Spinelli. “Those two characters work really well together and them having a P.I. agency was really fun and interesting and intriguing,” Monaco praised in 2023. “I love anything that keeps Sam active, and having her in P.I. mode was a way to keep her active without it being, like, the hitman’s girlfriend doing dangerous things.”
JPI
The OG Davis girls — (from l.) Haley Pullos’s Molly, Lexi Ainsworth’s Kristina, Nancy Lee Grahn’s Alexis and Monaco in 2016.
“Widow’s” Pique
After marrying Jason in 2011, Sam’s long-held dream of becoming a mother was fulfilled in 2012, when she gave birth to her son with Jason, Danny. That same year, Jason was presumed dead when Burton exited the show. “When Steve left, I didn’t have any other choice but to sort of get on board with whatever they had in store for Sam,” Monaco noted in 2023. She delved deeper into her mentality on that issue in a 2016 Digest interview, saying that Sam’s maturity in the wake of Jason’s apparent death “is something that I worked really hard at after Steve left and I knew that the character of Jason was going to be gone. I wasn’t sure in what direction they were going to take Sam, but I said to myself, ‘No matter how this story goes and where they are putting this character, I have got to find a way to make sure that she is solid enough to get by on her own, that a man doesn’t define her, her children don’t define her. She’s got to find her footing, whether it’s there in the writing or it’s something I have to play that’s not there.’ ”
But Monaco was confident that there was plenty of storyline left for Sam. “I wasn’t scared for my character because she already had so many ties and relationships,” she observed in 2018. “I thought it was good to see her grieve and be on her own. You got to see the character take on a different role as a mother, as a woman and as a professional.”
Post-Jason, Sam was paired with two different characters, John McBain and Silas Clay, that were played by Michael Easton, who, as Stephen/Caleb, had been her love interest on Port Charles. “I enjoyed both of those relationships so much because I love Michael Easton so much! I’ll work with him eight days out of seven,” Monaco proclaimed in 2018.
Sam was then moved into a romance with Jason Thompson’s Patrick Drake; like Sam, he was a single parent who had lost the love of his life (wife Robin). Monaco observed in 2018, “They had both felt this devastating sort of loss [and] they were able to say, ‘You’ve got a kid, I’ve got a kid, and we can pick up and move on and still have a great life.’ I think there was something really sweet and innocent about their relationship.”
ABC/Patrick Wymore
Sam was “widowed” in 2012, a year after she and Jason tied the knot in an unconventional ceremony.
Twice Blessed
Sam and Patrick ended their engagement when it came to light that Jason was alive. At the time, the role was played by Billy Miller, who passed away in 2023. In 2016, Monaco assessed the recast to Digest, saying, “With a different person, it’s a whole different rhythm that you have to get used to, a whole different communication, a whole different language. Billy speaks a different language than Steve, and our chemistry is completely different, our friendship is completely different, our working relationship is completely different. These are all things you have to figure out along the way.” She added, “As Kelly playing the role of Sam, I had to find the things that Billy was doing playing Jason that were super-different than what Steve did and have Sam fall in love with those traits, those characteristics, the quirkiness. It’s a completely different dynamic and completely different energy, but the story is the same, and as long as we just follow through with that main thread, I think it’s really fun to discover all these new nuances on the side. I’m having a blast with it! Both of them bring a certain dynamic to the character of Jason. I love Steve’s work and what he brought, and I also love what Billy’s bringing. It’s fresh and it’s new and exciting, and I hope it continues for a while.”
“JaSam” 2.0, the one brought to life by Monaco and Miller, also birthed another baby for Sam: her daughter, Scout. But in 2017, Burton returned to GH, and it was ultimately revealed that Miller’s character was not, in fact, Jason, but rather his heretofore unknown twin, Drew, who had been “memory-mapped” to assume Jason’s identity. For a time, Sam was torn between both men; she ultimately reconciled with Jason, but the pair split for good in 2020. In 2023, Monaco voiced her steadfast belief that Sam and Jason were meant to be, saying to Digest, “I’ve had multiple relationships on the show, but ultimately, in my mind, Sam and Jason were always the end game. In their love for each other, no affairs or other relationships or time apart or whatever could ever have come between them…. Jason and Sam would have always chosen each other in the end.” She also remarked, “I still feel for the history of the characters. Sam will never love anyone the way she loved Jason and I don’t think Jason will ever love anyone the way he loved Sam. Jason was the love of her life.”
At the same time, the actress praised Dominic Zamprogna, whose Dante was Sam’s final love interest; they got engaged just before Sam’s tragic passing. “Dom is awesome,” she proclaimed. “I love working with him. He’s super-fun, he’s a wonderful actor and he’s got my back no end.”
ABC
Monaco and Billy Miller in 2017.
The End Of An Era
In 2023, Monaco marveled at how her character had evolved since GH introduced her in 2003. “Sam came on to the canvas only having herself and her brother, always taking care of someone and never being taken care of. I think the biggest evolution for her is starting from being a really lonely, scared woman and becoming a woman who is still really independent, but is protected by family and friends and love and relationships and loyalty, and she never had that before. Now she has a family and kids. She came in bent and broken, and I feel like there’s a lot of her that’s still broken, but she’s constantly sort of putting the Rubik’s Cube together. All the pieces don’t fit perfectly yet, but it’s certainly not broken anymore!”
As GH fans are mourning her character’s death, Monaco has yet to speak at length about her exit from the show. But in 2013, when Digest asked Monaco what her enduring popularity with GH fans meant to her, this is what she had to say. “I don’t really think about the effect that my character has on the audience,” she began. “I think the only time I really get a grasp on it and a light is kind of shined upon it is during our fan club weekend and stuff like that, when you really get to meet the fan base face to face and listen to their personal stories about why they watch the show and what you do that makes their day a little bit better. That’s when I go, ‘Oh, wow. I’m making a difference!’ It makes me realize that I’m not just telling a story that’s self-gratifying on television, I’m actually making a difference for people and helping them escape for an hour a day. Sometimes it’s hard to remember or wrap my head around the fact that there are actually people out there rooting for me and for my character, but I appreciate it and I value that so much. I feel really lucky to have found my home here.”
Disney/Christine Bartolucci
Monaco opposite Grahn and Cosette Abinante (Scout) in one of her final scenes.
