Exclusive: Bryan Craig Dishes Morgan's Dramatic Return To General Hospital

ABC

We Meet Again: Morgan (Bryan Craig) visits a tormented Sonny (Maurice Benard).

It took little to convince Bryan Craig to make a brief return to the role of Morgan Corinthos on General Hospital , a character he won two Daytime Emmys for portraying from 2013-16. The main draw? The prospect of reuniting with his Port Charles pop, Maurice Benard (Sonny). The actor chatted exclusively with Soap Opera Digest about his comeback.

The actor was approached about returning through the usual channels. Reports Craig, "Either [Casting Director] Mark Teschner or [Executive Producer] Frank Valentini reached out to my agents, and they reached out to me and said, 'Would you be interested in coming back for a special episode?' And I was like, 'Well, what is it? And who is it with?' And they were like, you know, 'All your stuff would be with Mo.' And basically," he chuckles, "I was like, 'Say less! Yeah, I'm down.' "

You Can Go Home Again

Craig says "it's a really nice compliment" that GH still has him on its radar. "I'm surprised that they haven't recast the role in such a long time," he notes. "I'm very grateful because I love working with Maurice and I love what we did towards the end of that run [when Morgan, like his father, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder]. It was so fun to be asked back and to be able to come back to further that storyline a little bit years later. I feel very privileged. "The episode airing this week marks Craig's second return since Morgan was killed by a car bomb intended for Sonny; he also came back to play a figment of ex-lover Ava's imagination back in 2018. Walking back onto the set nearly six years later, he says, "was weird, like I was stepping back into a decade ago. Nothing over there at the studio has really changed. I mean, some stuff has changed a little bit, but it was the craziest thing, going on the set, because none of my former co-stars had changed at all! They didn't age! It's like GH is a time capsule or something. Seriously, it was really weird. If anything, everybody looked even better! But it was strange just to see the machine [of production] running the same way it was running 10 years ago, not a beat skipped."

The actor had touched base with Benard before the day they filmed together. "He and I keep in touch, and we'd talked briefly before because I hadn't gotten the pages [from the script] yet. I was like, 'Dude, give me the low-down! Tell me what we're doing!' So, he kind of filled me in before I got the pages, which was cool. We were both really excited to work together again."

Parent Rap

On the day he taped, Craig underwent a longer-than-usual stint in the makeup chair ("I have some new tattoos [that had to be covered], so I spent some decent time with them"), then slipped upstairs to the soundstage, where Benard was filming another set of scenes. "While Mo was filming, I went behind the camera," he grins. "And when they yelled, 'Cut!', I pretended to be the director and gave him a note. I was like, 'Yeah, that was great. So, uh, if you could just suck a little less on the next go-round, that would be great.' And he recognized my voice and turned toward the cameras and started laughing. So that was fun!"

While the show is keeping the specifics of Morgan's encounter with Sonny under wraps, it's no secret that Sonny is in a bad way: He's not properly medicated for his bipolar disorder, he's poised for a nasty custody battle with Ava over Avery, and as if that's not bad enough, his firstborn daughter, Kristina, took a near-deadly plunge out of a Metro Court hotel room. And given how many versions of Morgan the actor had been tasked with playing over his time on the show — a feisty Morgan, a brooding Morgan, an out-of-control Morgan — he was curious to find out what incarnation of the character the show wanted him to embody this time around. "I didn't know [exactly what they wanted], so I was just kind of prepared whatever the director said they wanted to go with, because there are so many different ways it could have gone, depending on how they wanted it to fit into the scenes," he acknowledges. Of the finished product, Craig says, "The stuff we filmed went great. It was really powerful, and we were both really in it. [Benard] was really happy with it."

Mutual Appreciation

The actor appreciates that fans of the show were jazzed by news of his return, however brief. "When I first signed on to the show way back when, I had never watched soaps, and I don't think my parents did, either, and I had no idea how many people watched. Then I started being on the show and getting recognized all the time and I was like, 'Wow, a lot of people watch GH!' To see the amount of people who have spoken up and been excited about this return over 10 years later is really crazy. It's such a compliment. It feels really nice and I appreciate it."

Craig can hardly believe it's been 11 years since he was cast as Morgan. "I'm a totally different person," he marvels. "I mean, I wasn't a teenager, but I was young — I was 21 or 22. I've grown a lot as a person and as an actor since then." He credits GH with helping him hone his craft. "You just can't get an experience like [being on a soap] anywhere else," he declares. "Especially playing the kind of stuff we were playing — doing the bipolar storyline, doing the amount of material we were doing at such a high frequency for years and years. It's certainly made everything else easier along the way. I can still look at a scene once and know it, I can still break [scripts] down in a very quick and efficient way, and it's all because of General Hospital . I'm very grateful for the experience."