Maxwell Caulfield Joins ‘General Hospital’ in Surprise Soap Return — Details on His Shady New Character

Maxwell Caulfield is returning to daytime for the first time in nearly 30 years with a special one-day appearance on General Hospital airing Friday, May 29.

The actor says he had been hoping for the right opportunity to join the ABC soap. “Mark Teschner, the brilliant casting director over there, has been working for a while to get a role for me on the show,” Caulfield tells TV Insider exclusively. “In this instance, it’s just a one-off, but I was happy to take it.”

In the episode, Caulfield portrays Apollo, a New York City gallery owner. Ava Jerome (Maura West) and Alexis Davis (Nancy Lee Grahn) pay him a visit to gather information on the mysterious Delilah, the mother of baby Phoebe, whom Brook Lynn Quartermaine (Amanda Setton) and Harrison Chase (Josh Swickard) want to adopt.

Of his alter ego, Caulfield teases, “There’s something a little dubious about him. It was nice having that little undercurrent to play whilst not quite knowing what it was about.”

The timing of his hire threw a wrench into the actor’s best-laid plans, but Caulfield made it work. “Juliet [Mills, his wife; Tabitha Lenox, Passions] and I were just about to get on a plane to go to the UK for her sister Hayley’s [Mills] big birthday,” he reveals. “She had a big landmark birthday in London, and that was the day that they needed me over there at Prospect [Studios]. You probably hear actors tell you all the time, but it’s a rule of thumb: If you want to get a job, book yourself a holiday and the phone will ring telling you to call it off. Juliet ended up going with our daughter, and I changed my ticket and stayed behind.”

Caulfield says working opposite Daytime Emmy winners West and Grahn helped ease his transition back into the fast-paced soap environment. “You jump into a show like this, it’s like trying to board a moving train,” he says. “They’re a great double act, those two. Maura’s got a great sense of humor, and Nancy was particularly reassuring and very sweet-natured. They put me completely at ease; I found working with them a delight. I ran into them in the makeup room, and they immediately offered to sit down and play out the scene a little bit, which was great because Ava and Apollo were supposed to know each other.”

He discovered he had some fans on the GH set, thanks to his cult-favorite film roles, including Michael Carrington in Grease 2 and Rex Manning in Empire Records. “I passed one of the handsomest guys on the show in the corridor,” Caulfield relays. “We didn’t exchange names, but I said, ‘Oh, well, there’s a certified soap hunk,’ — 6’3”, square jaw, the rest of it — and as I was leaving, he was one of the guys who insisted that we get photographed together. He said, ‘Come on, Rex Manning. I gotta get a shot with Rex.’”

But Caulfield was especially happy to reconnect with some familiar faces in front of and behind the cameras. “Quite a few of them I knew from Juliet’s show Passions,” he points out. “Starting right away, I saw Gary Tomlin. He was directing some pickup shots. I saw MK [Weir], one of the lead producers over there. I got a lovely welcome from Brook Kerr [Portia Robinson; Whitney Russell, Passions]. She was toiling away on another set. Phideaux Xavier is a very good friend of ours, and he obviously has directed a lot of shows over the years over there. I just couldn’t have had a nicer reception from everybody.”

Caulfield says the supernatural NBC sudser still occupies a special place in his and Mills’ lives. “Obviously, Tabitha was the heart of that show, and to this day, it’s got a following,” he says. “The people who loved Passions were fiercely loyal to it, and they loved the eccentricity of that show. And they’ve had some tremendous success with the alumni of that show. I mean, look at Justin Hartley [Fox Crane]. Mr. Hartley is, like, the last man standing on network primetime to get a new series [Tracker] and hold his own. There was a beautiful spirit over there on Passions, and every so often, they still get together as a group. It’s very sweet, and they’re all aging terribly well!”

GH marks Caulfield’s first American daytime soap since portraying Pierce Riley on All My Children from 1996-97, a memorable experience for him. “I got to meet the creator of the show, Miss [Agnes] Nixon herself, at Tavern on the Green in New York City,” he recalls. “And that was like meeting The Godmother. But it was a slightly jinxed role insofar as I was the third guy to step in and play this part, and they made a very odd decision, which was to go back and tell the Pierce Riley story all over again.”

It didn’t go over well with the audience. “I think there was a certain ennui that kicked in, despite best efforts,” he reflects. “You expect a certain amount of repetition in soap opera, but you don’t expect to wind the clock back and go, ‘OK, forget everything you saw in the last two years. Let’s start the story all over again,’ but without any change at all except the face of the actor involved. But I did enjoy it. I enjoyed particularly seeing [Dynasty costar] Mike Nader [Dimitri Marick, AMC; Dex Dexter, Dynasty] over there. Not that I had any scenes with him, but watching Mike in action was something else.”

Caulfield’s first soap, however, was Ryan’s Hope in 1980, where he landed a small but distinctive role. “I played a drunken punk in a bar down by the docks or something,” he relays. “I had a good two or three episodes there playing the meathead, and I enjoyed it. It was a wonderful classic back in the day.”

Since then, his appreciation for soap actors has only deepened. “Let’s face it, soap opera is called that because it was used to sell products to housewives in its origins,” he notes. “But it was kind of looked down on by actors with lofty aspirations, and yet I think that is the toughest acting there is because you really do have to make something from nothing sometimes. You just have to, by sheer force of personality, be able to essentially play out the same phase of a story for quite a while, or variations on a theme, because they’re telling so many stories simultaneously. They can’t all be frontburner stories, and they all can’t move at the same pace.”

And now, after getting a taste of life in Port Charles, Caulfield says he’d happily return if the opportunity arose. “I got great treatment over there,” he says. “I certainly felt a lot of love and respect. It was a lovely affirmation from Frank [Valentini, executive producer] and the guys over at ABC. I had just a little taste of what it’s like to be on GH, and it was very gratifying.”