My chat with soap star Michael Easton about his signature long hair and abrupt end to the Kish storyline of OLTL

Even though ABC’s One Life to Live has gone off of the air, Michael Easton was one of the few actors who were given the opportunity to keep playing their role on the network’s last remaining soap, General Hospital.

The sexy, long-haired star plays John McBain on GH and even though I don’t watch the show hardly ever, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to chat Michael up last week during the TV Critics Association’s Summer Press Tour.

My first question was about his hair! McBain was a police chief on OLTL and the long locks certainly were a departure for that type of position.

‘I kept thinking I should cut it but I ended up doing a ride-along with some New York City guys and they had a guy who had really long hair who did undercover stuff. When my character first came on One Life, he was an undercover FBI agent so I thought that was an extension of that.’

‘Personally, I kind of live in another era like maybe I think I’m Jan-Michael Vincent in the 70s with that sort of longish hair. I just kind of like it. No one came up and made a big deal about cutting it so I just kind of let it go. All the great warriors have long hair.’

When he was on OLTL and McBain was police chief of the soap’s fictional town of Lanview, one of the members of the force was Oliver Fish, a gay cop played by Scott Evans. McBain proved himself to be a straight ally in the storyline which got a lot of attention – and eventually some backlash – for its gay triangle, its showing two men in bed together for the first time on a daytime soap, and for its very political gay marriage storyline.

I wondered what Michael thought of the storyline and the fact that the gay characters were abruptly written out when ratings dipped.

‘I thought it was great,’ he said of the storyline. ‘Scott was terrific and I think he did great work. I think it could have been handled a little more subtly, a little more organically. It would have been good to introduce it and not make it the elephant in the room which I think they did so it became a little heavy handed. The whole town sort of came around one storyline. I though that was an interesting dynamic [Oliver and his boyfriend Kyle) they had going and they should have had the same chance as any other couple you put together and not have to carry the weight of the show. But I thought it was an important storyline. I’m glad they did it and I wish they would have extended it. We lost a couple of really good actors and just on a personal level, I missed those guys.’