SAD NEWS: General Hospital viewers were emotional as they had to say goodbye to Jeff Kober as Cyrus

Jeff Kober: You know what? I’m just now starting to process it because I shot five episodes on January 15th, and on January 16^th, I flew to India for nearly a month and had all the experiences that one has when one goes to India for nearly a month. I miss going to work, I miss the people, I miss the process. I gotta tell you, I love acting on a soap. It’s so dangerous for an actor to let go and let the scene happen, and General Hospital gave me an opportunity to practice that letting go, day after day after day, and I relished that. And I will miss that.

Digest: I think when we really got the sense that the writing might be on the wall for Cyrus was back in December, when it was revealed that he murdered Sam McCall. Was it a shock to you when you found out he was the killer?

Kober: It was definitely a leap. The thing about soap opera writing and acting is, it’s always open to interpretation. As an actor, you kind of have to be ready, willing and able to jump in a particular direction. When I saw that script, I said, “Wait a minute! Don’t I get a vote?” And they said, “No, of course not [laughs].” And I had to make it work within the realm of my logic of the character and of the world. You have to go to a certain level of crazy. The whole thing of, “Did he find God or not?” — we lived in that world for a long time and from that perspective, it was kind of a relief to go, like, “Oh, he’s killing people. Even if he’s doing it in the name of the Lord, still, he’s killing people!” The character made sense to me more. Just in terms of the way it feels to be in a character, it was a relief and a return to form.

Digest: After he killed Sam, he killed Dex, and Evan Hofer (ex-Dex) said he had a blast filming those scenes with you. How did you feel about having to do in Dex?

Kober (chuckles): In that case, I felt that character could use some killing. I didn’t mind that. And we had fun! Yeah, I didn’t mind killing him. That was different, too, because it was like, “Wait a minute, he’s knifing this guy. What?! And not only that, he’s doing it at Christmas?” It was a confusing set of circumstances, but fun to play!

Digest: Before he died, Cyrus showed up rather menacingly at Elizabeth Webber’s door. She, along with Lucky, had been working to prove that Cyrus was the killer. What was it like to work on those scenes with Rebecca Herbst (Elizabeth)?

Kober: It was my first time working with her and she was so professional and prepared and strong. We really got to do the dance together and she takes great direction — when Frank [Valentini, executive producer] or one of the directors would say, “Maybe this part of the scene is a little more about this or that,” both of us would adjust and go to different places with it. I really enjoyed working with her.

Digest: In those scenes, Cyrus sort of explained to Liz why he was going around injecting people with lethal amounts of digitalis and tampering with Lulu’s ventilator. Were you learning about his motivation in real time, when you got the scripts?

Kober: Absolutely. I mean, it was in the direction that I had made up in my own mind, that Cyrus is “doing the work of the Lord.” Even just saying that kind of makes me feel a little creepy right now! I appreciated having that as a motivating factor and then being able to talk about it with her. When a character ends up having all the exposition of why this happened and why that happened and why they are this way, that can be really challenging to do as an actor. But it didn’t end up that way. She and I were really having a conversation about this, and to her credit, Rebecca was just really interested, or her character was really interested, in what I was going to say, and really empathetic. And then that allows us to go to a whole different place — not just, you know, me over there twirling my mustache and her trying to figure out how to not die! It becomes a story.

Digest: Well, speaking of dying, what stands out to you about your last scenes, working with Eden McCoy (Josslyn) and your last day in general?

Kober: Eden was just a joy. We had fun and I have to say — I haven’t seen it, but from being in it — I’ve died many times in many different storylines, and I think this is perhaps one of my best deaths. The thing about just finding freedom within a scene as an actor, when you really are playing with the other person … you don’t leave things up to chance, you leave them up to flow and to being in the moment, and when you do that, there’s always a chance that you’re going to fail utterly and crash and burn. But there’s also the chance that all the elements come together in some perfect moment, and you’re able to capture something that at least feels magical, and that some of that magic then translates to the people watching. And I think we had that in our last scene together. So, I’m really happy with the way it turned out. I do feel like it was a good death. As an actor, I would have liked to have maybe a bit more of an arc [about what] the character was going through emotionally and personally, and it wasn’t that. It was like, “Cyrus was doing something bad and he has to be stopped.” The storyline really wasn’t about Cyrus’s point of view on any of this. It was about someone else’s point of view on it. But that being said, the scenes that they gave me were just stellar and rich and all the stuff with Elizabeth, it just couldn’t have been stronger, and the death is a great finish to it.

Digest: What did it feel like walking out of the building that day?

Kober: It was bittersweet. I had over 40 pages of dialogue that day, and I was packing for India and I was preparing to take 16 people over there on a meditation retreat, and so I had so much going on. It was interesting in that I didn’t really have time to mourn the passing of that experience and so it still feels alive to me, and every once in a while, I think, “Oh, you don’t get to go back,” and then it’s like, “Awww.” On the day, though, it felt like, “Well, that was a job well done, and now I gotta get on a plane.”

Digest: Did you have the opportunity to have a good-bye conversation with Frank Valentini?

Kober: I absolutely had that opportunity. Frank has a big heart and he doesn’t enjoy, you know, killing people’s characters. So I had to just bear that in mind, that it’s uncomfortable for him to say good-bye. But we had a really lovely conversation, and I thanked him for the opportunity and he said, “This is a character that was supposed to last six months, and here it is, five years later.” And that’s four-and-a-half years of gravy! I have nothing but gratitude toward Frank. I did want to torture him at least a little bit for letting me go, so I did that, but all in good fun.

Digest: Between all the script memorization and the preparation for your month away, did you have any feelings creeping in on set, like, “Oh, this is my last scene with Genie Francis [Laura],” or, “This is my last scene with Michael [E. Knight, Martin]?”

Kober: Here and there, that happened, but some of the last scenes with those people, I didn’t know it was the last scene until later. Genie and Michael and Fin [Finola Hughes, Anna], those are three people that I just always loved to work with, but when we did our last scenes, I didn’t know they were the last time we would do that. But we got to talk it out in the hallways. [They were] like, “What’s happening? Really?!” Another thing in soap opera land is that you don’t know what’s happening in someone else’s storyline! But we got to say good-bye properly anyway.

Digest: You’ve had such a long career and worked on so many projects before GH, it’s interesting to think that Cyrus is probably the character you played the longest.

Kober: It really is! Longer than China Beach, more episodes… It’s a lot of episodes! But you know, it’s all of a piece. Now we can get deep, because as I said, I was just in India, and what you realize when you’re there and living in that reality is that this whole thing is just a character that we’re playing. In India, they believe that the body and the personality are things that you just change out lifetime to lifetime, but that what you are goes on. And even if you don’t believe in reincarnation and the eternal nature of the soul, it’s kind of the same as an actor. It’s the essence of what you are being expressed through a different personality and what really matters is, to what degree are you able to find truth and freedom in that expression? And what I’ll remember about General Hospital is just the permission I had to really explore what that looked like on a daily basis. It was so rare that anyone said, “Oh, don’t do that.” That’s rare and that’s beautiful and I’ll take that with me and I’ll be grateful to Frank and all the directors for that wherever I go.

Digest: Is there anything you would like to say to the GH viewers reading this?

Kober: I would like to thank the audience for working through their initial hatred of Cyrus — of course, this is just from social media, that’s all I can go on — to embracing him as a valid character and a good place to put their anger and judgment and hatred! I really do appreciate the fans’ appreciation of me and of the character and of the stories we were able to tell. There’s nothing like the GH audience! They’re so solid and delightful in all my experiences with them.