Disney/Bahareh Ritter
Fancy Meeting You Here: Elizabeth (Rebecca Herbst) and Lucky (Jonathan Jackson) are back where it all began.
At the end of the Monday, September 30 episode of General Hospital, Elizabeth and Lucky came face to face for the first time since 2015. Because GH is not airing on Tuesday or Wednesday of this week due to Major League Baseball’s post-season schedule, fans will have to wait a few more days to see how their reunion unfolds. But worry not! Soap Opera Digest got Jonathan Jackson (Lucky) to give us the inside scoop on the highly anticipated scenes.
We Meet Again
It was in August of 1997 that Liz and Lucky first laid eyes on one another — outside of Kelly’s no, less. The diner has a new name — it was rechristened as Bobbie’s back in January, in honor of the late Bobbie Spencer, Lucky’s aunt — but it struck Jackson as fitting that the first Liz/Lucky scenes this time around also take place there. “We have had so many scenes over the years that it felt nostalgic,” he notes.
Jackson shares that when it came to performing Lucky’s reaction to seeing Elizabeth, he thought back to advice he once got from Anthony Geary, who played Lucky’s dad, Luke Spencer. “Something Tony told me once a long time ago has stuck with me,” he begins. “I was getting ready to film a movie called The Deep End of the Ocean at the time. I think I was maybe 15 or 16, and I was reading the novel that it was based on and I was just talking to him about some of that preparation. And he said, ‘All the preparation you do is really good — just remember that you can’t act information.’ And it was just a really freeing thing [to think about as an actor].
“The Lucky and Elizabeth moment,” he continues, “it’s one of those things — it’s like, the history is so rich and the setting and the characters and the memories, not only that we have, but the audience has, as well, and all of that strength is there. And it all kind of speaks for itself, really. I think as an actor, the most important thing is just to be present and to kind of just be in the moment and to listen because when everything else around you is already working for you, you don’t really need to overthink it. All of that subtext is there.”
A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes
The Bobbie’s reunion is not, as viewers know, the first time Rebecca Herbst (Elizabeth) and Jackson worked together since Jackson reported back to GH duty in July — that happened when they shot the dream Lucky recently had about Elizabeth in his jail cell. The actors put great care into striking the right tone for that sequence, and how to approach playing dream-like versions of their characters. Liz appearing in the dream as a manifestation of Lucky’s subconscious “was something that came up as we were working through the scenes,” Jackson reports. “Becky is so great at what she does, and there’s such a history there between Lucky and Elizabeth, so most of [how we played it was] just very intuitive. But there were a couple directions that it could take that we talked through. And I think it was nice to be able to do that — it was helpful for me, anyway, to understand a little bit of Lucky’s subconscious, you know? In that dream, the version of Elizabeth that comes to him has some righteous indignation, and I thought Becky was really amazing in that scene. She had that kind of strength, but there was also a sense of grace and love that was present in there, as well.”
Those fantasy scenes had an impact on the real, in-the-flesh meeting between the characters at Bobbie’s, Jackson feels. “I think Becky and I being able to have the vision/dream sequence in the jail kind of gave us an emotional anchoring to go through all the other things when they actually meet,” he offers. “It was kind of a way of us exploring some of the subtext, even prior to doing the scenes where they met back in Port Charles.”
And when Liz and Lucky do finally interact, “I think, again, there’s a lot of subtext and a lot to unpack for each of them,” Jackson explains. “Unlike in his vision [of her in the dream], Elizabeth is not — outwardly, anyway — angry, or sort of chiding him. But there’s a tension there; there’s a lot of remorse and guilt, I think, in Lucky. And so in the scenes, there’s the familiarity and the awkwardness of the situation, of him not really being there for the last decade. And those levels were fun to play. It’s just an interesting dynamic that we go through in life, where you might have a kind of rapport with someone that is just natural and it clicks into place very quickly and that can exist on one level while all this unresolved tension exists simultaneously, and having all those layers kind of happening at the same time! It seemed like there was something along the lines of that happening [in the Bobbie’s scenes].”
Expect Liz and Lucky to cover a topic of great mutual interest to them: their son, Aiden, who Lucky has not been in great communication with. Jackson says he’s excited to explore the Lucky/Aiden relationship with the show’s new Aiden, Colin Cassidy. “Playing Tony’s son was just so fascinating, and I’m so looking forward to it,” he enthuses. “I mean, that’s another amazing part of this medium that is so unique. I started [as Lucky] at age 11 and got to be the child and teenager to Tony and Genie [Francis, Laura], to Luke and Laura, and then get to come back as an adult and Lucky has his own grown son … It’s really a very unique and special thing.”
Are you hoping this Liz/Lucky encounter is the start of a new romantic chapter for them, or would rather they remain platonic co-parents? Let us know in the comments below!
