On General Hospital, Jason Morgan has been a central figure in Sonny Corinthos’s life since the mafia don took the troubled Quartermaine scion under his wing in the wake of his brain injury back in 1996 — and the actors who portray them, Maurice Benard (Sonny) and Steve Burton (Jason), have likewise been tight for decades.
Burton is currently on a hiatus from the show, having announced in February that he was taking a break to focus on family. Benard shared his thoughts on Sonny and Jason’s final encounter with Soap Opera Digest.
Fond Farewell
Back in March, Jason dropped by Sonny’s and shared his plan to leave Port Charles with Britt (Kelly Thiebaud) and lay low until her Huntington’s medication was successfully reverse engineered, and the longtime friends vowed to always be there for one another.
Benard says that those moments between Sonny and Jason reminded him of Sonny saying good-bye to Luke when the late Anthony Geary retired in 2015. “My last scene with Jason was kind of like my last scene with Luke — he got emotional, I got emotional,” the Daytime Emmy-winner muses.
“It wasn’t written that way, because Sonny doesn’t really know its a good-bye, but that’s the way we played it. In the last scene, they’re both really sad.”
Benard didn’t know for sure at the time that Sonny and Jason wouldn’t share more screen time before Burton’s final day of taping, but he suspected that would be the case, and he says that his real-life emotions crept into the scene. “I knew that I wouldn’t see Steve for a while, and that was sad to me,” he explains.
“And I can’t help but play sensitivity; I have a lot of that in me. I can cry on a dime, and sometimes I have to stop because it doesn’t make sense [for the scene].”
In this instance, he did his best to pull back. “I had to literally go, ‘This is way too much for these little scenes!’”
The actor does, of course, understand Burton’s reason for taking some time off. “I get it completely, 100 percent,” he declares. “You have to understand, Steve has been through quite a lot in the last couple of years and he should be able to do whatever the hell he wants with whoever the hell he wants!”
On the show, Jason and Britt’s exit scheme went awry and Jason wound up in WSB custody after taking the fall for shooting Cullum (Andrew Hawkes) to protect the real shooter, Sonny’s grandson Rocco (Finn Carr).
Determined to bring his friend home, he enlisted the aid of his brother, Ric (Rick Hearst), who has insisted he is sincere in his desire to help despite the years of bad blood between him and Jason.
Benard notes that Jason’s absence “opens up a whole thing between Sonny and Ric, and we’ll see what comes down the pike, but I like that he’s using Ric to help. I’m having a lot of fun with Rick!”
