‘General Hospital’s Chris McKenna Will Never Forget Starting Out on ‘One Life to Live’ (Exclusive)
Chris McKenna may be General Hospital’s new Jack Brennan, but he’ll never forget getting his big break in 1990, when he was cast as One Life to Live’s Joey Buchanan.
The Queens, NY native, who began acting at age seven, was only 12 when he was hired to play Joey, the son of Viki Buchanan (Erika Slezak) and Joe Riley, who was adopted by Clint Buchanan (Clint Ritchie). “Puberty, growing up on TV, it was a crazy experience,” McKenna reflects to ReMIND. “Those years were so important to me. It was really an amazing time back then and it was my whole childhood. It was so important to my career and my life. So, it’s really fun being back on daytime again with people who knew me back then and having another run at it.”
Though McKenna’s years in Llanview were relatively uneventful, his most notable storyline was being a part of the beautifully scripted, critically acclaimed coming-out story for Joey’s best pal, Billy Douglas, played by Ryan Phillippe in 1992. In a 2014 interview with Soap Opera Digest, McKenna noted, “It really didn’t mean much to me at the time. First of all, homosexuality was not a big deal to me. I had been acting in theater and around openly gay people for many years, so I just didn’t see the problem. Now, I understood the impact of the AIDS epidemic and the AIDS quilt that we incorporated into the story, but I didn’t comprehend the difficulty of coming out and being accepted as a LGBT person at the time. I have since, of course, realized what a big deal that was and am very proud to have been a part of that.”
@arianapuzzo since chris mckenna’s first ep on gh airs tomorrow, here is a flashback from when he played joey buchanan on oltl #fyp #foryou #onelifetolive #oltl #joeybuchanan #chrismckenna #billydouglas #ryanphillippe #soapopera #tvshow #generalhospital #generalhospitalabc #gh #lgbtq #comingout ♬ original sound – Ariana Puzzo
The experience of working with such emotional material on a regular basis set the stage for McKenna’s future success. “It’s hard to overstate the amount of training that you get,” he says. “Doing 100 pages a day, getting new scripts, having a consistent job for years, being able to watch yourself a few times a week to get better, I learned so much doing soaps. I teach acting classes now, and I tell them what a valuable training ground it is, and how the actors on soaps are the hardest working actors in this in this industry and don’t get nearly enough credit.”
After leaving One Life to Live — fun fact: his replacement was The Rookie’s Nathan Fillion! — McKenna eventually went on to do a slew of primetime projects, including State of Affairs, NCIS, Good Trouble, 90210 and Major Crimes, to name a few, then returned to daytime in 2014 as Detective Mark Harding on The Young and the Restless. “That was really cool,” he says. “That was the first time I went back to daytime after 25 years or something, and that was supposed to be a three-day gig, a temporary replacement for Chavez [played by Ignacio Serricchio]. I wasn’t going to be the goofy sidekick. I was going to be the toughest cop in the city, and they loved it. And by the end of the day, it was my job, and Harding was a new character.”
Three days turned into a year and a half at the show. “I had so much fun doing that and it established a new chapter in my career before I moved on to do State of Affairs and other things,” he says. “But that was a really valuable time.”
George Lange / © Warner Bros. Television / Courtesy: Everett Collection
McKenna reports that he crossed paths with one of his former Y&R costars on his first day at GH. “I ran into Steve Burton [GH’s Jason Morgan, who played Y&R’s Dylan McAvoy]. He didn’t know that I was on the show; I didn’t tell him anything. And then I saw him walk by and he didn’t see me and then he saw me on the monitor and showed up in my dressing room, like, ‘What the heck?’ And he congratulated me and we hugged. The last time he saw me, I was a dead body on Y&R.”
But his OLTL connections still run deep — in fact, McKenna heard from his TV mom after he booked his new role. “Erika wrote me immediately,” he relays. “She apparently had just talked to Frank [Valentini, producer of GH and OLTL] and he told her that I was on the show, and she squealed and was so excited and she wrote me to congratulate me. She sends me Christmas cards and we exchange little messages, but that was the longest thing she’s written me and I feel like we reconnected again because of that. So that was really cool. She’s my second mom.”
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June 2017
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