Soap Hub Flashback Friday: Tristan Rogers Recalls The Asian Quarter Storyline

Selina Wu was introduced in 2015, but the Wu crime family roots on General Hospital go back to 1985 when Mr. Chaing Wu, Selina’s grandfather, ran the mob family and oppressed the people who lived in the Asian Quarter. The notorious mobster kidnaped Robin Scorpio, while Robert Scorpio and Anna Devane did their best to find their daughter. Actor Tristan Rogers recalls the challenging shoot on location in Vancouver, British Colombia.

Tristan Rogers Remembers Location Nightmare

Daytime Emmy award-winning actor Tristan Rogers recalled the curse and the joy of location shooting for fans at a recent Zoom Event hosted by Coastal Entertainment. “I mean, we shot a lot of that up in Vancouver, and I remember it.” 

Unfortunately, the memories were not fond ones as he went into it with a shattered shoulder injury from a fall while ice skating. “Well, I just had surgery on my left arm to basically put my shoulder back together. I had destroyed it.” The weather wasn’t working in his favor either. “It was raining like all hell up there, and it was cold, and it was miserable, and it just wasn’t conducive to someone who just had surgery on their shoulder.”

He described the conditions when he was on location. “That morning, we had a storm,” he shared and went on to explain. “So we got up there. It was probably one of the worst shoots in my life. Mainly because I was in a really physically bad state, and there was this one scene where I had to clamber down a ladder to the water’s edge, jump on this boat, and then go hammering out to the ocean with a whole bunch of other boats behind me.

“Fortunately, I knew how to handle the boat,” he established. “That wasn’t a problem. The problem was that it was like about 30 degrees, and I started to freeze up, and my left arm started to seize up because it was still full of stitches and all sorts of other stuff, and it just wasn’t going to work.”

The actor was hoping for a lucky break. Rogers wasn’t above asking for a little help. “I thought to myself, ‘Oh, please, please, let’s get this whole damn thing in one take for Christ’s sake.'”

A Match Made In GH Heaven

Someone was listening because the production crew got what they needed. “Sure enough. We got the damn thing in one take, and they came down and said they had a blanket, and they wrapped it around me, and they said, ‘Tristan, we’ve got a room for you to sit in.’ I said, ‘Okay, thank you.'”

What happened next was a mini-miracle and more than the actor could have hoped for. “They take me up to this room and sit me down. Fine. I’m sitting there for about 10 minutes. I’m going, ‘There’s a door over there; where the hell’s that door going to?’ So I go over there, open the door, there’s a fire burning there. It’s a bar, which is just up my alley. I thought, ‘Oh God, there is a Jesus up there.'”

Tristan Rogers quickly made himself at home. “I just go in there, helped myself, and it was just like all of a sudden the entire production turned around in a second. Now, there was a fire in the fireplace in the bar. It was a nice burning fire…warm, and cozy. Somebody kindly put a bar in there. I don’t know how…but I availed myself of it.” And that’s a wrap, folks.