“First and foremost, it’s an absolute pleasure to be back in daytime,” says Daniel Goddard, who has been cast as Henry Dalton, a new character on General Hospital, and will make his Port Charles debut on April 15.
For the actor, who portrayed The Young and the Restless‘ Cane Ashby from 2007 to 2019 (and his twin, Caleb, in 2011), performing wasn’t necessarily on his radar at the time GH came his way. “I was not really thinking about going back to acting,” he reveals. “I had kind of come to terms with that life.”
But in December 2024, he received a call from his former manager, Michael Bruno, who wanted to submit him for a role on the ABC soap. “The funny is, about four or five days before he texted me, out of the blue, I had this really strong, cosmic kind of moment where something about General Hospital was really prominent in my mind,” Goddard shares. “It was really bizarre. It happened about a month before I met my wife in 1998. I said to myself, ‘I’m ready to meet the one I meant to be with,’ and I opened myself up to the acceptance of, ‘I want this in my life.’”
The role was the recast of Jack Brennan, previously played by Charles Mesure, and getting back in the game put Goddard in an emotional spot. “It’s the first audition I’ve had in many years, and it was a bizarre experience for me,” he admits. “You feel like, in a way, you’re going back to ground zero, back to the beginning of it all, even though you’ve been on a different soap opera for, like, 15 years. It was humbling, but it was more of an awakening, and in that moment, I felt extraordinarily vulnerable.”
Especially when he realized he wasn’t the only familiar name in the mix. “I was standing out in the hallway, and there were four or five other guys there, one of them was Daniel Cosgrove [Ezra Boyle, GH], and I was like, ‘Oh, wow. There’s a bunch of people here and there’s competition,’ so instantly I become fearful of the fact that I didn’t want to fail,” he explains. “So, I kind of felt this incredible pressure, and I walked in the room, and I saw Laura [Wright, Carly Spencer] and Frank [Valentini, executive producer], and the writers, and Mark [Teschner, casting director] and I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is real. This is really happening.’”
The role ultimately went to Chris McKenna, but GH wasn’t quite done with Goddard. “A few weeks later, Michael called me and he said, ‘General Hospital called, and they’ve got this character, and they’re writing it, and they want you to do it,’” Goddard reveals. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ I was just gobsmacked by it. It wasn’t a recast. It was a new character, and I was so blown away. I really felt like the timing was right, and I felt like it was meant to be. I can’t begin to express my gratitude to Frank and everyone at General Hospital and to Michael Bruno for really believing in me and being there.”
Goddard reported to work in mid-March as the enigmatic Professor Henry Dalton, who works at Port Charles University. “He teaches environmental physics, and it seems there are some things in his past that he’s done that have left him in a position of some form of investigation,” teases Goddard. “And from there, it’s an absolute mystery to me.”
And that’s how the actor prefers it. “I said to Frank, ‘Don’t tell me anything about the character,’” Goddard shares. “I know that the characters that I’ve had scenes with know something about him. I don’t want to know what it is because I don’t want to play it that I know. I’d rather have the character be sort of a clean slate to me. At Young and the Restless, I always used to read the whole script because other characters will talk about you, and you’ll get to know more about you than you know about yourself. At General Hospital, you only get your pages, and I thought, ‘Woody Allen would do that, where he doesn’t want everybody know what’s going on or what the twists and turns are.’ And I thought, ‘This is going to be cool.’ So, I’m allowing myself to go on the journey of who Dalton is from the audience’s perspective, and from my perspective of what is the growth and evolution of him. I will allow it to unfold as the bits and pieces present themselves to me.”
So far, Eden McCoy (Josslyn Jacks) and Finola Hughes (Anna Devane) are some of the actors who have shared scenes with the newcomer, and he has rave reviews for both. “What a blessing to have someone with Finola’s cachet, and her value and her experience and talent,” he praises. “It was just such a wonderful experience. I was like, ‘You know what I want? I want to have fun. Let’s just have some fun.’ And she said, ‘Oh, God, I would love that.’ So, we played these scenes, and they were great. I just love the moments with her. Same thing with Eden — I think she’s fantastic. With Josslyn, it’s professor and student, and a great push and pull there.”
Goddard has already encountered some familiar faces at the set and is looking forward to reconnecting with Genie Francis (Laura Collins) and Tristan Rogers (Robert Scorpio), who played Cane’s parents, Genevieve and Colin Atkinson, on Y&R. “I’ve been waiting for my moment to see Genie and give her a big hello and a big hug,” he says. “I haven’t seen Tristan. I’m not sure where Scorpio is at the moment, but I’ve seen Steve Burton [Jason Morgan, who played Y&R’s Dylan McAvoy], and we had a great chat. I saw Eva LaRue [Natalia Rogers-Ramirez, who played Y&R’s Celeste Rosales], and we had a bit of chat. Daytime is a family and until you’ve been in it, you don’t really understand how tight it is.”
That close-knit feeling among the cast and getting to act in general are some of the many reasons he’s thrilled to be back in the genre. “Here I am, feeling like I belong,” he reflects. “I feel like this is something that is not just meant to be; I feel like this completes something in me that’s been missing. When you act on a daily basis, like Young and Restless for all those years, there’s a part of you that becomes this entity that expresses themselves this way. When you stop doing it, there’s always that part of you that’s missing, and then you start again, and it’s kind of like you take all those things you learned in the past that has sat in your subconscious for all these years, and then you reapply it. And it’s better. You’ve had a chance to metabolize it all, and when you call back upon it, you have this different understanding of how that craft should be applied.”
Goddard looks back on his Y&R experience with fondness, but his relationship with the viewers he met through the job is especially meaningful to him today. “I forever will be grateful to the fans of daytime in general,” he notes. “It goes back to in 2010 when Cane was killed off and fans banded together, rented an airplane, and flew it over CBS with a banner saying, ‘Bring Daniel Goddard back as Cane.’ And I never realized, up until that moment, how the fans of daytime are truly the greatest fans in the world. They see you as the character because you’re in their lives on such a regular basis, and then as the years pass by, they get to know you as your real name. And then you form these relationships through social media and going to fan events, and it’s just a phenomenal fan base that was wonderful.”
One that he hopes follows him to Port Charles, where he is having a great time as Professor Dalton. “It’s been an extraordinary, wonderful experience so far,” Goddard enthuses. “I just got new scripts, and I have four episodes coming up in one week, which I’m so excited about. It makes me feel wanted, in the sense that everything that I’ve gone through in this process up until now is meant to be. I couldn’t be more grateful to be back in what I think is probably the most beloved genre in all of entertainment.”
