It’s only been a few weeks since Steve Burton made his long-anticipated return to GENERAL HOSPITAL as Jason. So, what on earth had the fan favorite so emotionally worked up that he nearly walked off the set? As Burton disclosed on his Daily Drama podcast with co-host Bradford Anderson (Spinelli), the scene in which Amanda Setton’s Brook Lynn visited Jason at the police department was a particularly difficult one for him to get through as a performer.
As viewers will recall, Jason was in the interrogation room at the PCPD awaiting his arraignment when Brook Lynn arrived to hand-deliver her cousin a letter written by his adoptive mother, Monica. The handwritten message on the notecard was just five words: “Jason I believe in you.” But knowing that Monica felt he was innocent of shooting Dante caused Jason to get teary-eyed… and affected his portrayer as well. “That was a very hard scene for me to do,” Burton confessed. “That was a tough one. That was the one time I was almost going to call ‘Cut.’ I was literally going to walk off the set.”
Despite his gut instinct to take a break, the daytime vet knew that if he took a few minutes to regroup, the vulnerability he’d shown in that moment would be gone. Burton explained to Anderson that after Brook Lynn pushed the letter across the table to Jason and began to walk out, he was supposed to stop her. “But I was so emotional, I couldn’t even get it out,” the GH star recalled. “And at that point, I’m like, ‘Do I just keep going, or do I just walk off the set right now?’ But I knew just to stay because it’s so hard to get back there. Once you shut it down, you’re like, ‘There’s no going back there.’ The next take is not going to be the same.”
Thankfully, Burton stuck it out — and delivered a powerful performance in the end. “It was tough, man,” he noted. “Emotionally, it was a tough scene. It was overwhelming in the moment.”
