General Hospital finally gave us the answers we’ve been looking for this week when it revealed that the man who has been calling himself Nathan West is not Nathan at all, but instead his twin brother, Cassius Faison. Yes, that was the plan all along, something Ryan Paevey had known from the start.
Nathan West is dead and buried
Eight years ago, we watched Maxie Jones (Kirsten Storms) mourn the loss of her husband, James Nathan West. We saw her bury him after a police funeral that won GH the Daytime Emmy before the ghost of her sister, Georgie, arrived to escort him to heaven. That’s why it seemed so strange when “Nathan” suddenly appeared just weeks after Sidwell (Carlo Rota) poisoned Maxie and sent her into a coma.
Nobody knew how he survived or even bothered to look into where the alleged amnesiac had been since 2018, and that included the amnesiac himself. Instead, Anna (Finola Hughes) just gave him his old job at the PCPD back, and Dante (Dominic Zamprogna) found his best friend again. It never made sense that Nathan would fall for Lulu and not even be all that bothered that his wife was in a coma, but that was because Nathan didn’t fall for Lulu (Alexa Havins). Cassius did.
Despite being brought back to play Cassius, Paevey admits that he had to be in Nathan mindset for the last six months until he finally filmed the reveal.
“I would ask, ‘Do you want me to pepper a little bit of Cassius in here?’ And the answer was always, ‘No, just be Nathan,'” Paevey told Soap Opera Digest. “So for the most part, it was basically just ‘Nathan minus Maxie.’ It was maybe a little bit of a coarser Nathan, but still Nathan. It wasn’t until really recently that I’ve gotten to do Cassius, and now it’s, You’re just Cassius now unless people are calling you Nathan, and then you just act like Nathan.'”
Faison’s fourth kid on General Hospital
While GH fans have been questioning who “Nathan” might actually be for months (with many hoping he really was just a back-from-the-dead Nathan), the biggest hint came a few weeks ago when Britt slipped up and mentioned to Josslyn that her father, Cesar Faison, had four kids.
The audience did a double-take and counted to three. There was Britt Westbourne (Kelly Thiebaud), Peter August (Wes Ramsey), and Nathan West, so did Nathan have a twin and that is who has been trying to solve Port Charles crimes since last fall? Apparently, the answer is a resounding yes.
We now know that Cassius has been working with Sidwell and Cullum the whole time, which means he is not the fine, upstanding citizen that his twin was. After all, Nathan was a Port Charles hero.
“In the weeks to come, obviously more stuff is going to be learned about this person, who is kind of Nathan, kind of not,” Paevey said. “Some of the things you learn are less than savory, shall we say, but he’s not a bad guy in the way that Faison is a bad guy.”
Expect to see Cassius grow a little too comfortable filling Nathan’s shoes. After all, Nathan was loved by all, which is a change of pace for someone raised by Cesar Faison.
Catch all-new episodes of General Hospital weekdays on ABC and Hulu.
Edited by Hope Campbell