Exclusive: General Hospital's Van Hansis On Becoming Lucas

Van Hansis, who won the hearts of As The World Turns viewers with his touching portrayal of Luke Snyder from 2005-10, was moved by the warm response fans had to the news that he was making a soap comeback, assuming the role of Lucas Jones on General Hospital. “It’s flattering as hell,” declares Hansis. “It has been such a long time since I was on daytime, so to be remembered and for people to be excited that I’m joining this show and playing this role and everything, it’s nothing but incredibly, incredibly flattering. It feels kind of full-circle in a really nice way.” Plus, he winks, “It’s a lot better than if people were like, ‘Oh, him? He’s coming back?’ It’s always good to have people be excited to see your work; I’m excited that people are excited to see me back because I’m so excited to back!” The actor opened up to Soap Opera Digest about taking on his new daytime assignment.

 

The Road To Port Charles

Hansis’s original contact with GH was not actually for the role of Lucas. He explains, “I live in New York and this shoots in L.A., but over the years, I’ve submitted tapes a number of times for different characters. There are pluses and minuses to doing self-tapes versus going in the room [auditioning at the studio]. But one of the things that I always loved about being able to go in the room to audition is that you get notes and talk to casting [directors] and really kind of figure out what they were looking for in a way that you don’t when you’re sort of just sending a tape out into the ether. But earlier this summer, I had another tape to send to them and I think pretty soon after, I got a response to that tape. I honestly don’t know if it was for Lucas or not because so many projects use dummy sides [audition scenes], so you don’t really know what character you’re auditioning for; there will be sides that they’ve maybe pulled from earlier episodes and it’s not actually your character saying these lines or whatever. So, I auditioned for a character, but I don’t know who it was. About a week later, I got an email from my agent out here in L.A. and she was like, ‘They’re interested in you for a different character. Would you be interested in it? And I was like, ‘Yeah, totally, I’m super-interested in it.’ Again, I did not know who the character was. I didn’t know anything about it!”

The actor was left on a cliffhanger for some time. “A couple of weeks went by and I hadn’t heard anything, so I emailed my agent and I was like, ‘So I guess they went in a different direction?’ And she said, ‘No, they’re very much interested in you.’ ” Soon enough, Hansis says, “I had a Zoom call with Frank [Valentini, executive producer] and Mark [Teschner, casting director] and they kind of told me who the character was.’ ” By that point, Hansis had a sneaking suspicion that Lucas was who they had in mind for him. “I had looked up General Hospital characters and I was kind of like, ‘Okay, this Lucas guy seems like it would be the right fit for me,’ ” he grins. “I was like, ‘I bet it’s him!’ ”

He got confirmation in that initial meeting. “On the call, they told me it was Lucas and that they were bringing him back after a long time of being gone.” In short order, the role was his, “and a month later, I was in L.A. shooting my first episode!”

Study Haul

Hansis relied on the Internet to get up to speed on his new character. “I became very acquainted with the General Hospital Wikipedia pages,” he notes. “With a soap opera, there’s just so much stuff — especially if your character was born on the show [as Lucas was back in 1989] — that you’re not going to know. It was very important to me that I honor the history of this character, even though he’s going to be different and I’m going to play him differently than Ryan [Carnes, the last actor to hold the role] did or whatever. With soap fans, you’re in these people’s living rooms five days a week. The fans really get to know your character like a person, and therefore the relationships and how they’re connected to all the different characters on the show, I think, is really super-important [to understand], because the fans aren’t going to forget any of that.”

With that in mind, he continues, “It was important for me to not feel like [my version of Lucas] was some stranger, even though it’s going to be my own spin on the character. I thought that making sure that his relationships felt like they had gone on for a bit was important.” That’s where his scene partners came in clutch. “Basically, my first few episodes are really just kind of reestablishing the character, so I did a lot of talking with everybody else in the cast. To a person, I was able to ask then, ‘How do we know each other?’ ‘How do I feel about you?’ ‘How do I feel about your relationship with so-and-so?’ And people were so, so good about filling in the backstory.”

Armed with all that information, Hansis dove in with abandon. He muses, “I think there is something to be said about, you can’t really jump into something like this and feel timid, because these are your character’s family, these are your character’s best friends, and you don’t necessarily feel timid around those people you have those connections with. It was important to me to try to do my best to make it feel like, even though he’s been off the map for a while, the character has lived in this world.”

Ex Marks The Spot

Hansis’s first scenes on air were with Lucas’s adoptive half sister, Carly. But the first scenes he actually shot were with Parry Shen (Brad, Lucas’s ex-husband) and Cassandra James (Terry). “The stuff at Carly’s house, I shot at the end of my first week being there,” he shares. “I had four or five days of shooting before that day, with Parry and Cassandra being the first day.”

The actor had familiarized himself with the somewhat twisted history Lucas shares with his former husband, whose long deception regarding the true identity of the baby boy they had adopted — baby Wiley was actually the birth son of Nelle Benson and Michael Corinthos — tore their marriage asunder. “That was the main story I had to figure out, what has gone on with the baby and all that stuff,” Hansis says. “I’d been on a soap for so long that I honestly was like, ‘Well, of course there’s a baby switch!’ It’s always interesting trying to explain storylines to people who don’t watch soap operas, because they’re the ones who are like, ‘Wait, what is happening?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, well, you know, he switched the baby, so my baby is actually my nephew now, and there was a cult leader, and a car accident… [laughs]’ But for me, that’s just the world the characters live in. While it’s all high stakes and dramatic and if that were to happen in real life, we’d be like, ‘That’s insane,’ for them, it’s like, ‘This is a Tuesday in Port Charles.’ ”

Never Say Never: All hope might not be lost for “Brucas” fans, according to Hansis, pictured with Parry Shen (Brad).

Hansis gives high marks to his first Brad/Lucas encounter. “Parry was great! He was the first actor I worked with and he’s really such a nice guy. We had three relatively short scenes, but it was really great working with him.”

And while Lucas professed to Brad that they were never, ever, ever getting back together, Hansis observes, “On soaps, characters say certain things and then act in a different way. So as much as my character is angry at him, they are love interests, so it’s like, ‘How much of that is really in play? How much of my being like, ‘We’ll never get back together’ is actually [how he feels]? You never know!”

After all, points out Hansis, “Regardless of the hurt that Lucas feels because of Brad, there is also a lot of history there. And one of the things I like about [where the characters are positioned] is that you can feel multiple things at once, right? And regardless of how hurt Lucas is by Brad, I think that Brad is one of the people who knows Lucas the best. There are a lot of conflicting feelings going on, I’ll say.”

Back To The Future

There is juicy story coming down the pike for Lucas once his reunion tour is complete, and Hansis says, “I’m diving into a really exciting storyline and it’s been such a blast to be here and to be working with all these awesome people both in front of and behind the cameras. It’s been really, really thrilling to be back on daytime. This sounds so cheesy, but on both World Turns and on General Hospital, [the studio floor] is a big dark space with all of these sets in a row on other side, and I don’t know, there’s just something really kind of special and magical about it. I love being on the soundstage. I’ve done a lot of stuff where I’ve shot on location and that’s fun, too, but when you’re on a soundstage waiting for your scenes or whatever, it’s like the same vibe I got when I was a kid doing local plays, like being backstage at a play. I love going up to the soundstage every day and seeing what the new sets are and everything. Maybe this comes with time and being older and just the ups and downs of a career, but I think it’s really important to take a beat and just kind of live in that [head space] of, ‘I love doing this! Aren’t I lucky?’

“My first day on As the World Turns was the first time I was ever on a soundstage,” Hansis continues. “It’s been so long since I’ve been on it, but I think especially because that was my first job, it’s what I got used to. So being able to come back to a soap all these years later, it really does feel like, ‘Oh, I know how this world works, I know the sort of intricacies of what daytime it like.’ As a genre, I really, really love doing it. I love the pace, I love how quick it is, I love that you get to do something different every day. I’m just really happy to be here.”

Hansis in 2007 with his then-leading man on As The World Turns, Jake Silbermann (ex-Noah).