General Hospital's New Jagger Actor, Adam J. Harrington, Breaks Silence on Taking Over for Antonio Sabato Jr.
Adam J. Harrington is opening up about being the new actor playing the role of John “Jagger” Cates on General Hospital, almost 30 years after original star Antonio Sabato Jr. left the show.
Antonio starred on the soap opera series from 1992 to 1995 and he has never returned, but he had some thoughts about Adam taking over the role.
“So now, they started a new character by the name of John. They don’t even call him ‘Jagger’. They call him ‘John’ because they know that the character’s only been played by me ’cause it’s part of who I am. It’s my life,” Antonio said.
Well, now Adam is opening up about being hired and how he didn’t even know which character he was playing when he signed on for the show!
Keep reading to find out more…
Adam told Soap Opera Digest, “I had met [Casting Director] Mark Teschner in October [2023] for another role. And they said, ‘It’s not gonna be yours, but hold on, we have something else in mind.’ When I went in for that, it was straight to a chemistry read with Laura Wright [Carly]. They let me know fairly quickly that that it wasn’t going to go my way, but to hold tight. And then they called again and they, ‘We’d love to have you on the show,’ and then they let me know who I was playing. So, I kind of got hired, and then I found out I was playing John.”
Adam admitted that he wasn’t aware of his character’s history at first.
“Of course, I had to go back and figure out who this guy was. I spent many hours watching the original storyline, and picked up as much as I could from there. It all happened very fast; this happened in late December, early January,” he said.
Adam also addressed taking over the role from Antonio and how they don’t look alike.
“That became very obvious when I went back and watched the original storyline!” he said. “My take on it was that it’s been 30 years; they obviously wanted to take this in a new direction and see what they could do with this storyline. And I also thought, ‘There is no way I can even touch what Antonio Sabato, Jr. did with the role in the past.’ Although I know it would be jarring for fans, in some ways, I was very happy that I didn’t look like I was going to try to mimic or echo at all what they had done with that storyline. Obviously, if they’re going my way, they were going to take this in a different direction with so much time having passed. TV is immortal and still very much fresh in people’s minds, but like I said, I took the recasting and looking so obviously different as them saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to take this in a different direction and we are not trying to replace or touch what was originally a beautiful story.’”
Read more from his interview at SoapOperaDigest.com.
Did you see that a General Hospital star was recently killed off the show.