Today Update General Hospital star Evan Hofer on Dex’s shocking fate! Dex is gone, WHY?

WARNING: This article contains spoilers for General Hospital season 62, episode 70.

And just like that, Port Charles will never be the same.

Fans who tuned in to General Hospital today were in for a shock when Dex Heller, the enigmatic Army-vet-turned-mercenary-mob-infiltrator-turned-romantic-hero-with-a-heart-of-gold died after being stabbed on Tuesday’s episode. As recently as yesterday on GH, Dex was in good spirits and expected to make a full recovery. But during a visit from friend Anna Devane (Finola Hughes) and girlfriend Josslyn (Eden McCoy), Dex went into cardiac arrest and died.

Evan Hofer first joined General Hospital in 2022 in a role that he says was meant to last “only one to three months.” Three years later, Dex’s death deals a major blow to several key characters on the long-running soap, potentially introduces a terrifying new killer, and leaves behind plenty of questions as to how the series will proceed without him. Though he confesses he’s “nervous” to see how fans will react to his swan song, he tells Entertainment Weekly that above all else, he’s “just so honored that they let me join the ranks.”

“I found out probably a few weeks before we filmed the scene,” Hofer says, “and honestly, I was just excited to find out what the story was going to be, and wanted to hear how that was going to go. So my last few weeks were really just trying to soak in how much I loved playing Dex, and how much I loved all the people over at GH. I had such a wonderful time there over the last two-and-a-half years, and I was just trying to make sure that I do justice to the character in those final episodes.”

Dex rolled into Port Charles in May 2022, shrouded in mystery and oozing a steely sex appeal. First employed as the manager of Volonino’s Gym, Dex was eventually taken under the wing of mob boss Sonny Corinthos (series veteran Maurice Benard), exposed as a double agent working for Sonny’s treacherous son Michael (Chad Duell), and finally struck out on his own, pursuing a legitimate law enforcement career as a means of shaking off the grip of his traumatic past.

Working with Benard is among the experiences he’ll miss most. “Mo really has been such a special person to me,” Hofer says, “and I feel so fortunate that I got to work with him from the beginning. We had a mutual colleague in Frances Fisher, who’s an incredible actor. Mo knew that apparently, and on my first day I walked in and he was like, ‘Frances.’ I was like, ‘Yeah?’ He said, ‘Oh, so you’re a good actor.’ We hit it off on the first day, and that’s all thanks to his warmth.”

While Sonny was nowhere near Rice Plaza at the time of the stabbing, fans know well by now that the Corinthos don is well-versed in effecting violent action from afar and by proxy. Josslyn even expressed concern that Sonny, her own stepfather, could be behind the attack, a suggestion that Dex dismisses. When asked where he thinks Sonny goes from here, Hofer says he “has no idea what the writers will do with it.” But he does have some ideas of his own.

“Sonny and Dex got really close and had this father-son relationship building. Sonny was this father figure that Dex always wanted, but in a really toxic, unhealthy way that a mob boss would be. I think that Sonny’s definitely going to feel a hole from that. It’s going to be these interesting, complex feelings of, ‘That guy was coming after me.’ They obviously weren’t good for a long time. Sonny beat up Dex at [Brook Lynn and Chase’s] wedding, and so they obviously were not cool. But I think that all that love and emotion between two people doesn’t just go away.”

The love between Josslyn and Dex was only growing more fervent and steadfast, making this one of the most tragic deaths in recent GH history. The couple enjoyed a fan-favorite relationship ever since they first got together on New Year’s Eve 2022. Josslyn’s mother being a Corinthos and Dex being a sometime protégé, sometime thorn in the family patriarch’s side, their union is controversial to some, but to others, it felt like destiny.

“I think that this might be the lover boy in me, but I love love,” Hofer says. “So I think his relationship with Josslyn was really what impacted Dex most in trying to get his life together, getting out of the mob, becoming the police officer, and realizing he never thought that he deserved anything good out of his life… he had a death wish for a really long time, and then she gave him a reason to live.”

Josslyn was there at the scene of the attack, and she watched as Dex died. No character on the series believed in Dex’s ability to turn his life around more than Josslyn, and no one helped him make it happen more.

Hofer feels he “could not have gotten any luckier starting out working with Mo and Eden so much, to build those relationships… We went from the beginning of the role – ‘Okay he’s in the mob, he was a veteran, so he’s got this edge. Alright, but how is he romantically?’ Getting to build all that out with Eden was really special.”

How will fans react to Josslyn losing Dex for good, though? “Not well,” he laughs, making light of the notorious dedication of the GH fanbase. “Mo always said this to me since the beginning, that our fans are like no others. Just the amount that they care and really put so much energy into the show and how much they care about it. And all of us, all the stories and all the history is so special.”

Fans have been speculating for months on social media, in articles, and via posts on daytime soap forums about Dex’s fate, as the character seemed to fade little by little from the center of Port Charles goings-on. Today’s episode confirms that their worst suspicions were correct, as it seems all of the secrets that Dex was keeping about the denizens of Port Charles — especially the reveal that he saw Cyrus (Jeff Kober) at General Hospital the night the latter injected Sam (Kelly Monaco) with digitalis — finally caught up to him.

But Hofer doesn’t betray the slightest bit of resentment about his departure. “From my very first day, I always got so excited to read the scripts, no matter what they were, and this was really no different. I was just dying to hear how the story would go, and getting to put a bookend on it is a really rare thing in any job, to actually get to wrap up a character arc.”

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Hofer joins a spate of General Hospital cast members to leave the show in the past year. Monaco announced in August that she’d be leaving the series after 21 years, but in October confessed that her exit “still doesn’t make sense.” Réal Andrews and Michael Easton are also on their ways out, and Chad Duell is leaving after 14 years.

Hofer shared many memorable scenes with Duell, who played Michael Corinthos. Michael’s another adoptive son of Sonny, and he hires Dex to gather intel on his felonious father, which majorly backfires in Dex’s face. Hofer calls Duell “an incredible actor” who has “been a great friend to me in all my time there. I think he’s doing what’s right for him, and I’m just so excited to see what he does. He’s such a great man, and I just want him to be happy, wherever that is.”

With Dex’s killer still at large and Josslyn in a state of deep mourning, Port Charles is looking like a much smaller, sadder place without Dex Heller. But the actor is looking forward to “some really exciting stuff coming up,” though “nothing I can talk about quite yet.”

Having graduated the “boot camp” of daytime drama (“You start getting those 40 pages a day and you’re like, ‘How am I going to do all this the next day?’ But it becomes second nature.”), he’s ready to take on anything.