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Michael Easton is no newcomer to acting. Even before he landed on General Hospital, he’d been One Life to Live’s John McBain, Port Charles’ Caleb Morley, done a slew of primetime shows from Ally McBeal to VR.5 and started out with a stint on Days of Our Lives. That first job as Days’ Tanner Scofield (who, we feel, should be brought back pronto) went a bit rougher than expected.
The actor sat down with General Hospital‘s Maurice Benard (Sonny) to chat on his State of Mind podcast for the first interview since departing the ABC sudser as Finn. One of the things they discussed was how Easton first ended up on TV, back when Days of Our Lives still aired on network television. The actor landed the role after someone from NBC spotted him in a play he’d written. That meeting didn’t go quite the way he was hoping, but it did prove fateful!
Easton spent almost a decade playing John McBain, moving him from One Life to Live to General Hospital
Credit: ©George De Sota/jpistudios.com
“I was like, ‘What did you think of the play?’” he recalled to Benard. “She looked at me, she goes, ‘That might have been one of the worst plays I’ve ever seen.’ She goes, ‘But you’re not a bad actor.’”
They sent him on a number of auditions and one of them was for Days of Our Lives. “They flew me out,” he explained, “first class to audition. I did a screen test. I flew back to New York and when I got back — these were the no cell phone days — there was a message on the answering machine, ‘You start on Friday.’
And that was that. He spent the next seven months living out of a motel (“I just didn’t think I was gonna have a job that long.”) before finally getting an apartment. But, it seems, Days of Our Lives just wasn’t meant to be — at least not at that point in Easton’s life.
“I got fired,” he admitted candidly. “I was difficult and they were difficult with me for being difficult, and I don’t blame them for firing me. I would have fired me too.”
But that didn’t work out too badly for him. As he joked to his former General Hospital co-star, he spent the next 10 years doing primetime series work. “It became kind of the joke,” he chuckled. “I’d go into the meetings and go, ‘Hey, listen, good news is all my pilots get picked up. Bad news is they all get canceled after one season.’”
But primetime’s loss was daytime’s gain, because in 2001 he made his first appearance on Port Charles as Caleb’s kindly alter-ego Michael Morley and the rest, as they say, is history. Watch the full interview below.
Check out the below photo gallery to review more stars like Easton who have played multiple roles on the same show.
Video: YouTube/State of Mind
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