GH Exclusive: Rick Hearst Says Ric/Ava Blackmail Scheme ‘Is Not About The Money’

ABC(2)

All’s Fair In Love And War? Ava (Maura West) pitched a high risk, high reward blackmail scheme to Ric (Rick Hearst).

It’s been a busy few days for General Hospital‘s Ric Lansing. First, he was nearly killed by Kristina, who cut the brakes on his car after mistaking it for Ava’s vehicle. Shortly after waking up in a hospital bed, he and Ava deduced that Kristina was behind the crash – and Ava convinced him to use that info to blackmail Kristina’s mother/Ric’s ex-wife, Alexis. Soap Opera Digest checked in with Ric’s portrayer, Rick Hearst, about the juicy string of events.

Soap Opera Digest: Congratulations to you on Ric making it out of that car wreck alive! I have to tell you, before Ric regained consciousness, a lot of people were asking me if I could tell them if Ric made it or not. They were worried, which is a compliment to you.

Rick Hearst: Good [laughs]! I’ll take it!

Digest: On Monday’s episode, Ava showed him the footage that led them to realize that Kristina cut the brakes on the car in an attempt to kill Ava. How would you sum up Ric’s reaction to this?

Hearst: I think he hates to have been proven right about somebody. He even says, “This is gonna absolutely destroy Molly and Kristina’s relationship.” But truth be damned between me and Alexis! I’m sorry, this girl is off the rails. I think now, he’s definitely in the quandary of how this is going to affect his daughter, but it always goes back to, “Sonny gets the attention. Sonny gets away with stuff and now his daughter gets away with stuff. Alexis will cover for her, my daughter is second best.”

Digest: True to form, dollar signs began to flash in Ava’s eyes, and she sees an opportunity to blackmail Alexis for some of that good Cassadine money. Did you feel like Ric needed a lot of arm-twisting to sign on to her scheme?

Hearst: You know, he’s not above taking advantage of a situation monetarily, but there’s so many more layers to this. I think it’s a great pull, because it does involve Ava. He doesn’t want to bail on Ava and she does make a very compelling argument that it’s not about the money, it’s about the leverage. The money is a device for power, a device of control, of being able to manipulate and wield and do all the things that he’s very comfortable with. It’s a way to utilize that for retribution. Potentially, putting Kristina away is an endgame. I think ideally, he would love to do that, but who knows what the fallout of that would be? It may make him feel great, but it would destroy Molly.

Digest: Ric and Alexis had called a truce in the prelude to the car crash. In light of that, does Ric have any compunction about signing on to the blackmail, or is that sort of a moot point for him?

Hearst: As the actor playing him, I was initially like, “Hmm, blackmail…” But I just try to lean into it and know that I have enough history about the character I play that it didn’t feel like a stretch. I feel like it will be a very complex sort of dance that he’ll go back and forth with. Ultimately, I believe that he does have pause about it, but he’s more about getting her to come to his side and realize that my daughter is our daughter as much as Kristina is hers and Sonny’s. From my viewpoint, I really love the story because so many characters are dealing with so many different of their own knee-jerk demons, right? I’ve told you about what Ric is dealing with, and then there’s the element of Alexis understanding that Kristina did eff up — she did something that could have cost somebody their life, she let her impulsiveness get the better of her, and now what does Alexis do? What would a parent do at that point? Do you protect them or do you let them fall and learn the lesson? That’s a tough position to be in. And there’s genuine remorse — at least in the moment — on Kristina’s part. And Ava’s got to look out for herself as well, right? She’s definitely playing on Ric’s heart. She’s not trying to necessarily manipulate him completely for her own gain, she’s just like, “Look, come to my side. You know it’s the better way.” It’s an, “I win, you win” sort of situation, and that’s one thing that they both get about each other. I’m really loving it because it’s, “How do you play it without the, the twisting of the mustache? How do you play that subterfuge or that subliminal message of having two meanings speaking to the same person?”

Digest: What was your approach to Ric lying to Elizabeth about the cause of the accident, suggesting they must have hit black ice?

Hearst: Yeah, that was a tough one. There’s all kinds of reluctance within that split second. Will he continue to play to his better angels, which is Elizabeth? But his current relationship is with Ava, so there’s that. If he thought he 100 percent still had a shot with Elizabeth, I think he might have told her [the truth]. But I think by virtue of the fact that he knows that, at this moment, that really isn’t in the cards — based in how they’ve been interacting and her being with Lucky and all of that — I think he decides not that she doesn’t deserve to know, he just thinks it’s better off if she doesn’t. There’s more risk in telling her at this point than not. I played it as, he’s been at this crossroads with her before. Ultimately, if this truly put her in danger, or if she had been hurt to the point where she was in a wheelchair and could never walk again or whatever, I think he would have [told her] — and I think, as a means of vengeance and retribution, he would have gone full bore into, “Kristina’s going to jail! I’ll make sure I will prosecute it! I will do whatever has to be done!” But in that moment [when he lied to Elizabeth], it’s almost like the words wanted to come out, but that protective, self-preservation instinct popped up for him in that second. Once he committed, there’s really no going back.

Digest: Did Rebecca Herbst (Elizabeth) give you any guff over your character’s failure to learn from his past mistakes where Liz is concerned?

Hearst: Yeah, we laughed about it. I looked at her after the scenes were done and went, “I’m sorry.” She was like, “Uh-huh,” gave me a little look. I said, “You know I love you!” She goes, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Digest: You mentioned Ric’s awareness of Liz’s rekindling relationship with Lucky. I’ve really enjoyed the scenes where the three of you are together in a room.

Hearst: I had a wonderful time with those. I’ve never overlapped with Jonathan Jackson [Lucky] before. I even said to him, “I’m so glad that I get the opportunity to play this out with you,” because when I was here last and there was any kind of friction between Ric and Lucky, it was with Greg Vaughan [ex-Lucky], and I never really got the chance to match it up with him — it was always like, “Oh, I’m the bad guy, he’s the good guy, that’s that.” And in this case, I had a little bit of meat to play with in terms of knowing that Lucky, he’s dipped out — many times! “So what makes you so great?”

Digest: Back to his current lover, does making this sort of unholy alliance bring Ric and Ava closer together?

Hearst: Yeah, I think so — but let’s just say they sleep with one eye open on each other. There’s that visceral, playful part of what they love about power and manipulation and for Ava, definitely money to a secondary degree. I think that’s the aphrodisiac between the two of them, so I think that does bring them closer together. But I think ultimately, with what they know about each other, they can’t fully trust whether they’re all in with one another. That question is always there, but it makes for something very exciting, and the thing I love about playing that with Maura [West, Ava] is that even though they’re in bed together, literally and figuratively, on so many levels, there’s always one foot off the bed, to make sure that they have their own balance.

ABC

Need To Know Basis: Ric decided to keep Elizabeth (Rebecca Herbst) in the dark about what caused their car crash.