carly nina
Credit: ABC screenshot (2)

“The hug afterwards is so nice.”

You may have a co-worker that you don’t much care for, but on the set of General Hospital, Laura Wright and Cynthia Watros are actually tasked with going off on one another — regularly. “Cynthia and I have been yelling in each other’s faces for two years at work,” marveled Wright during a recent visit to The Locher Room (which you can watch in full below.). So it’s important that they have clear distinctions between real and reel life, like their occasional pickleball games.

carly ava nina MAURA WEST, LAURA WRIGHT, CYNTHIA WATROS

Off screen, they’re close. Sometimes literally.

Credit: ABC

What helps the Emmy winners the most is simply being conscious of where they end and Carly and Nina begin. “It’s being aware to separate,” Wright said, “and really drop it into when you want to go full on.

“You don’t want to so worry about the other person,” she added, “because you lose what you need to do for you [in the scene], so you trust that the other person has it figured out” as well as you have.

That said, the on-screen nemesis do have a ritual that makes it all OK. “That’s why,” Wright said, “the hug afterwards is so nice.”

This definitely called for a hug.

Credit: ABC screenshot (4)

It sure seems like the former Guiding Light castmates are going to need that embrace in the future. After what Wright called “the trial from hell that went on forever,” Carly learned that Nina was the biological mother of son Michael’s sweetheart, Willow — a situation so ripe with potential for conflict that Carly told Drew, “Something just fell in my lap. I did not go looking for this, this came right to me!”

Needless to say, “people are going nuts right now online,” observed Wright, with fans insisting that Carly should reveal what she’s found out to Nina. But “she hasn’t even known a week,” noted the actress, keenly attuned to the way soaps build tension.

“Maybe I’ll do the right thing,” she added in character. Eventually. Any way you slice it, though, Carly, Nina, Willow, Michael and Sonny are “all gonna have great hurdles and explosions and consequences” to face.

 

Perhaps if Carly keeps this tidbit of information from Nina for a while, she’ll have a harder time lashing out at her rival for keeping secret Sonny’s whereabouts (after Carly withheld the circumstances of Nelle’s demise). “I’m sure Carly will justify it in some bizarre way,” Wright laughed, “which will be like what she does.”

For more summer preview, check out the photo gallery below.

Video: YouTube/The Locher Room