DUSTIN TIME

GH’s Mark Lawson Is Thrilled To Get A Second Shot At Soaps.

- Mara Levinsky

Mark Lawson, whose three-year run as ONE LIFE TO LIVE’s Brody Lovett came to an end with the show’s 2012 finale, had been hoping for another crack at daytime long before the right role — Dustin Phillips on GH — came calling last summer. “I’ve been eager for it for a while, partly because it scared the hell out of me,” explains the actor. “I missed jumping off the cliff the way you have to on a soap set. You don’t have a whole lot of time to hem and haw and worry about your performance, you just have to go. I felt like I was ready for that again and I wanted that again. And thankfully, this one came along.”

The Lawson who signed on to GH in 2019 is in a totally different place in his life than he was back when OLTL hired him. The actor, who had been a theater geek since landing the role of Turkey Boy in his community theater’s musical version of A Christmas Carol at the age of 8, moved to L.A. in 2003 after majoring in musical theater at the Boston Conservatory and completing a one-year post-grad classical acting course at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, “and I just started grinding from there.” But like many a young, aspiring actor before him, breaking into the business was a challenge for Lawson — so much so that he was thisclose to throwing in the towel on acting to focus on his thriving career as a personal trainer. “In my head, I was going, ‘Okay, the next step is I open my own little space and build my training business from there.’ I wasn’t even really pursuing acting anymore.”