GH’s Maurice Benard and Chad Duell Open Up About Their Difficult Start
Although GENERAL HOSPITAL co-stars Maurice Benard (Sonny) and Chad Duell (Michael) are extremely close friends in real life, that wasn’t always the case. In fact, when Duell was first cast on GH as Sonny and Carly’s son back in 2010, to say that Benard was less than thrilled to have the newcomer taking over the role of Michael is an understatement!
During Duell’s recent appearance on Benard’s State of Mind YouTube series, the two dove into their rocky history, discussing how the latter gave his younger colleague a hard time after replacing Drew Garrett in the role. “I’m very loyal when I like somebody,” Benard recalled. “They had an actor playing Michael who I thought was good, and we got close. And I was really working hard with him. Then I come home on a Sunday, and my wife is on the phone with the executive producer at the time [Jill Farren Phelps] and she said they fired [Garrett]. And I was pissed.”
Back when Duell auditioned, he was actually trying out for the role of Keifer. Instead of casting him as Kristina’s abusive boyfriend, Phelps hired Duell to play the role of Michael. Benard admitted that not only was he reluctant to meet his new co-star, but he was far from welcoming. “I’ve got to give Chad a lot of credit because I wasn’t a good person,” the Emmy winner confessed. “I wasn’t nice. I was not cool to him for like, six months.”
However, Duell didn’t think that Benard gave him the cold shoulder for that long. “Don’t try to defend what I did,” Benard pled, to which Duell replied with a laugh, “I’m not. I’ll gladly throw you under the bus!”
Duell went on to say that he was quite anxious when he joined the soap, knowing that “somebody just got fired because of me” and that his character was front-and-center in a major storyline surrounding the murder of stepmother Claudia. “I got there my first day and [was] feeling all that pressure and anxiety,” Duell recalled. “I met you in the hallway and you weren’t making eye contact with me. And I was like, ‘Okay, that’s a good start. He wasn’t happy.’”
To this day, Duell still hasn’t watched his first scenes on GH. “It was awful,” he confessed. “They had me in the middle of a storyline. The first day, I was with Dominic [Zamprogna, Dante] and I was telling him that I killed Claudia. And I was so nervous that I sweated through two shirts, I almost vomited, I was having panic attacks. I knew everybody was looking at me like, ‘Oh, this is the guy that got him fired, we’ll see what he can do.’ And the stuff I had to do in that take, like that’s getting baptism by fire. And I think, they’re going to fire me, I felt like I couldn’t do it, I wasn’t performing well because I was too nervous to actually let my performance come through.”
A few weeks after his start, Duell had to play the intense scenes where Michael was interrogated on the witness stand during his trial for killing Claudia. And much to Benard’s chagrin, he couldn’t deny that the daytime newbie was talented. “You were killing it, and I hated it,” he admitted. “That’s how much of a jerk I was. ‘He’s doing so good, dammit. He’ll mess up here… ’ And you never did. It was actually a very good performance.”
Shortly after that, Benard’s feelings toward Duell began to thaw. “Then I came around, and we became close,” he shared. “Like a real son.” Thankfully, twelve years later, the real-life relationship between the two men is as strong as their reel-life one!
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