Adam Harrington on Taking Over the Role of Jagger on GH
When Adam Harrington met with GENERAL HOSPITAL casting director Mark Teschner for a role on the soap back in October 2023, he didn’t get that part but was told to hang on because they might have something else in mind for him. And that eventually turned out to be taking over the role of John “Jagger” Cates, the character previously played in the ‘90s by Antonio Sabato, Jr.!
“I had to go back and figure out who this guy was,” Harrington told Soap Opera Digest of researching his new daytime alter ego’s history in Port Charles. “I spent many hours watching the original storyline and picked up as much as I could from there.”
Like many viewers, Harrington is well aware that he doesn’t physically resemble Sabato, Jr., but he thinks that can actually be considered a positive in this case. “My take on it was that it’s been 30 years,” the actor mused. “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,” he added, “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.”
While Harrington could use Jagger’s past in Port Charles to help develop his take on the character, there are also those decades he spent off-screen that have yet to be established. “Well, the only thing I really had to go off of is his history,” he explained, “which is so rich, about his childhood, his relationship with his brother [Stone], and his relationship with Karen. And then after that, what I just went in with was kind of the fuel of how he felt about Sonny because of the past.
“He spent a long time away focusing on his career,” Harrington continued, “and he’s coming back to a place with a lot of mixed memories. So there is a little bit of, maybe he’s slightly reserved at first. He’s kind of on home turn, but not on home turf; he is coming in with a job to do that he has to focus on, and yet, it’s like anybody going back to a place that has mixed memories — you’re kind of thrown off your game a bit at first. So I just kind of took what was actually happening for me [as a newbie at the show] and just thought, ‘This is probably how he’s feeling, too.’”
Stay tuned to see how John’s storyline develops!
