GH’s Maurice Benard Mentors Marcus Coloma On State Of Mind

Maurice Benard was joined by his General Hospital co-star Marcus Coloma, who has played Nikolas Cassadine since 2019, in his first State of Mind video podcast of 2022. The show took an interesting turn, a little bit like watching a great tennis match following the ball, or in this case mental health subjects, expertly aimed back and forth. Or a mentor counseling his protege — a coach building up the confidence of his star player. The two Port Charles residents began at the beginning.

Marcus Coloma: On Growing Up In His Family

Marcus Coloma described the difficulty of growing up with mixed ancestry — having a father being of Spanish, Philippine, Native American, and Native Hawaiian descent, and his mother as being mostly Irish. His father was an athlete with a full scholarship to Brigham Young University in Utah, and his parents lived in student housing. The actor shared that while growing up, there were a lot of kids around who pushed him down, so it took him longer to learn how to walk. A great metaphor for life, he reckoned.

By the age of 6 or 7, Coloma moved with his family to Cobb Mountain in Northern California where the national forest was backed up to where he lived. He began noticing some not so helpful coping skills.

“I couldn’t talk to people, literally,” he revealed to Benard (Sonny, GH). “I remember asking my mom, ‘how do you talk to people,’ because I always felt this strong, strong love for people, but I was terrified about talking to people. I was super anxious. So nervous that I would feel it physically.”

After some bullying based on his ethnicity, anxiety turned to depression. “Especially around 15 or 16 when I started falling in love and all that stuff. There were a lot of suicidal themes in my life like Hamlet and Lethal Weapon.” Coloma was just trying to make sense of it all, “I just didn’t know what made a person valuable. What made a person worthy?”

Movies became an escape. Marcus Coloma talked of wanting to be a singer when he saw movies such as Grease and Jailhouse Rock. A fighter pilot when he saw Top Gun. A police officer when he saw Lethal Weapon. Even inspired when he saw Hamlet, ‘To be or not to be?’ when it touched upon the same questions that he asked himself. Benard noted that it was that dreaming that lit the first spark of love for acting. An “Aha” moment for Coloma.

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The Road to General Hospital

“Right before I booked General Hospital, I had a really good year. I shot a big national commercial. There was a helicopter. It was massive. It was huge. I made really good money on it. I shot an ABC pilot in Dallas. It was a series regular with some big names attached to it.

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“It was a great year,” Coloma continued. “I worked four days out of the entire year. The commercial was one day, the pilot was one day. I think I did another commercial and another pilot. And when General Hospital came along, I said to myself that I was never going to become a great actor working four days a year.”

Subjects covered by the two friends were the effects of surrounding yourself with negative people, the importance of choosing positive friends, allowing yourself to feel and show those feelings, self-sabotage in relationships, stepping into the role vacated by Tyler Christopher as Nikolas, how the new version of West Side Story brought him to tears, and the value of love at this moment in time. Watch the entire State of Mind episode on YouTube here.

Follow Marcus Coloma on Twitter and Instagram. Follow Maurice Benard on Twitter, Instagram, and for more episodes of State Of Mind go to the main page of the video podcasts here.

General Hospital (GH) airs weekdays on ABC. Check your local listings for airtimes. For more about what’s coming up in Port Charles, check out all the latest that’s been posted on General Hospital spoilers, and for an in-depth look at the show’s history, click here.