GH's Ingo Rademacher Opens up About Exploring His Dark Side

Many actors revel in playing devious villains… but not GENERAL HOSPITAL star Ingo Rademacher (Jax). “I’m much happier playing the white knight,” he said to Soaps In Depth. “I get to joke around, be happy and be jolly old me.”

Playing bad, on the other hand, means tapping into his other side. “One time, I auditioned for a psycho-killer opposite Ashley Judd,” he recounted. “The character beat her and shot her up with drugs. He was so far away from me or anyone I’d want to play, but I said, ‘You know what? Let’s give this a shot.’ So I drank black coffee for five days straight — and it worked. It was still a piece of me that came out.”

The method, however, took a bit of a toll on Rademacher personally and wasn’t an experience he’d like to relive. “It was really ugly. I felt depressed afterwards. And I thought about the fact that if you play a role like that all the time, you could really live that. There’s a dark side to all of us if we let ourselves [tap into] that depressive state.”

For more from your favorite GH stars, keep reading the ABC edition of Soaps In Depth magazine.

This story originally appeared in our print magazine

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