As Dominic Zamprogna celebrates his 15th anniversary with General Hospital on June 22, he has another reason to cheer, too: that the soap welcomed him home with open arms after his 2018 exit. When he hung up Dante’s badge, the native of Canada was eager to see how he’d fare in Hollywood.
“I came here with this job and didn’t know any casting people,” he tells Soap Opera Digest. “I was almost 40, and I was like, ‘OK, worst-case scenario, the show gets canceled tomorrow, I haven’t done my due diligence in this town to make sure people know me… ’
“I’m a terrible networker,” he adds, “but the one thing you have to do is audition, and for the longest time here, it wasn’t really possible to do other projects.
But in 2018, Frank [Valentini, executive producer] let me go out and do this show in Calgary, and I had actually screen-tested the two previous years for other pilots.
I realized, ‘That’s really the only exposure I’ve had to other casting directors down here. I should really kind of get out there.’ So I did.”
In hindsight, Zamprogna sees benefits of his time away from the soap that go well beyond contact-making. “I call it kind of a mental health break because I’ve never been in the same place for this long, playing the same character,” he says.
“I just felt, ‘I think I need to go and kind of do something else for a while.’ And in doing that, I achieved what I wanted to do — I met a lot of casting directors, you take general meetings, you do a bunch of auditions. You kind of get your hustle back, and that’s important, too.
