Heroine Anna Devane is in a real pickle on General Hospital: She’s being held captive by local evildoer Sidwell (Carlo Rota) and his newly-revealed partner-in-crime, WSB Ross Cullum (Andrew Hawkes), and it appears that they’re on their way to successfully convincing their prisoner that her mortal enemy, Cesar Faison (Anders Hove), is torturing her from beyond the grave. While Anna’s straits are certainly dire, they provided her portrayer, Finola Hughes, with the opportunity to act opposite Hove — albeit only in the form of his voice — for the first time since Faison was killed off in 2018. Soap Opera Digest checked in with the actress about her unorthodox reunion with one of her favorite co-stars.

So Close And Yet So Far

Though Hughes hasn’t shared GH scenes with Hove in years, the two actors have stayed in touch, and the pair spent time together in Amsterdam in 2024 when they visited the late Anthony Geary (ex-Luke). “I love him so,” she smiles. “He is one of my favorite scene partners of all time.”

Hove, who is based in Denmark, recorded his recent batch of dialogue from there — but before doing so, Hughes reports, “He texted with me.” The actors discussed the scenes, and when it came time for Hughes to actually film the highly emotional scenes in which Faison’s voice taunts a distraught Anna over a loudspeaker, she says, “It was nuts!”

That’s because even though Hove wasn’t physically there, she was able to hear his vocal performance and react to it in the moment. “They played it to the [studio] floor,” she explains. As a result, she marvels, it felt to her like “I was working with him, except he was in Europe and prerecorded it!”

As GH watchers know, Faison and Anna’s history dates back to before her arrival in Port Charles in 1985. When Hove was first cast as the villainous Faison in 1990, flashbacks revealed how the characters had first become entangled when Anna was young and Faison’s mother, Sybil McTavish, had worked as Anna’s nanny. As adults, they met again when Anna became a double agent, working both for the good guys (the WSB) and the bad guys (the DVX, Faison’s criminal cartel). Faison became dangerously obsessed with Anna, which he expressed in various ways, from the merely disturbing — such as writing novels featuring a fictionalized version of Anna named Davnee (an anagram for Devane) under his pen name, PK Sinclair — to the downright sinister, such as kidnapping her or donning a high-tech mask and assuming the identity of her presumed-dead husband, Duke Lavery (Ian Buchanan), to lure her into his bed.

Faison was in and out of Anna’s life many times over the years, but his reign of terror appeared definitively over in 2018, when he was shot by Jason (Steve Burton). Faison’s son Peter August (Wes Ramsey) — whose mother is Anna’s now-deceased identical twin, Alex Devane — subsequently visited him in the hospital. When Faison went into cardiac arrest, Peter blocked his pop from summoning help and watched him die. Anna paid a final visit to her nemesis in the morgue, needing to see his corpse with her own eyes to believe that after decades, her Faison-inflicted travails were finally over.

With such a rich backstory fueling the Anna/Faison dynamic, Hughes enthuses, “It was a really cool method to tap into Anna’s past, her psyche. And working with Anders, even if he’s 9,000 miles away, is always such a treat!”