Exclusive: General Hospital's Tabyana Ali On Clicking With Giovanni Mazza

ABC

Before they ever shared scenes together on General Hospital , Tabyana Ali (Trina) and Giovanni Mazza (Gio) hit it off as friends. Mazza explained to Soap Opera Digest that after the two got together to run lines outside of work and ended up spending several hours enjoying one another's company, "it just felt like I had known her my whole life!”

Her Side Of The Story

"He and I were actually just texting like 10 minutes ago," Ali chuckles to Digest . "He is just like a big golden retriever. I really do love him and appreciate him and I'm so glad for the friendship that we're building."

The actress reports, "When I first met him, he's not what I expected. I don't know why I thought he might have been a quiet, stoic, mysterious guy, but he's more like a happy, cheerful, 'let's dance and sing!' kind of guy. I appreciate that so much." She praises, "He is so talented. He has a spark in [his] eyes that just makes me believe that he will go so far in his career. And actually being on set with him, I think he's a phenomenal actor. He's so good and he's so natural. I think that's one thing that everybody [at the show] agreed on when we first saw him in person, that he's so natural and so real. Like, there are times that you think, like, 'Oh, maybe he didn't mean to do that,' but it was actually a choice and he just pulled it off so well! It's like, 'Where did you come from? You came out of a talented magician's hat!' "

Shopping Companions

Ali's fondness for Mazza was solidified the very first time they hung out. In advance of their first scenes, "We met up at a Starbucks and we were supposed to just have coffee or a cute little tea or whatever," she recounts. "And then we ended up just kind of walking around through the mall. I forced him to go shoe-shopping with me and to look at clothes and I thought, 'He's gonna be like, "Ugh, this girl," but he ended up enjoying it, I guess! And we ended up just kind of really connecting on that. And we talked about astrology, because I love astrology so much, and he let me psychoanalyze him through that and he said I was pretty spot-on with some of it. And then we studied and rehearsed, and that was my first time really getting to see him act a little bit, and right there, I knew he was really good and is somebody that takes his craft very seriously."

Mazza continued to impress Ali as the day unfolded. "We ended up walking and talking some more and getting more food and just hanging out," she says. "He told me his life story; I told him my life story. He met my mom at some point and he met some of my friends randomly, as well. They were walking around the town that we were in and they end up clicking! I was like, 'He's just a guy that just knows how to charm everybody. He's a really good charmer. He has a lot of charisma. He has rizz, everybody [ laughs ]!"