Beginning on Tuesday, February 18, General Hospital’s Lucky Spencer will look a little different. Guy Wilson, who previously starred on Days of Our Lives as Will Horton, is assuming the role on a temporary basis from Jonathan Jackson. A spokesperson for the show confirms exclusively to Soap Opera Digest that he will appear as Lucky in a handful of episodes. Jackson is already back filming and will return to the airwaves later this month.
Familiar Territory
Wilson’s short-term takeover as Lucky actually marks the actor’s second stint on GH: In March 2006, he played a teenage version of Luke in a fantasy sequence that had Luke (Lucky’s late father) and Tracy imagining what it would have been like had they met in their younger days.
Wilson has a few things in common with the character he’ll be playing. Like Lucky, Wilson is a musician — and even more unusually, his father was the mayor of the town in which he grew up, Sebastpol, CA. (Although Lucky has the distinction of being able to say that both his father and his mother have served as the mayor of Port Charles.)
It was back in 2014 that Wilson took on his first major assignment in the daytime scene, assuming the high-profile role of Will — son of legacy characters Sami Brady and Lucas Horton — from three-time Daytime Emmy-winner Chandler Massey. The actor compared working on a soap to the world of professional athletics, telling Soap Opera Digest, “In a lot of respects, I look at it that way, not just because being on a soap is a ‘team sport,’ but because of the endurance that comes with it,” he observed. “Like baseball, appearing on a soap is a long season and everyone is working together and you develop a camaraderie.”
Wilson exited DAYS in 2015 with the character’s death at the hands of Ben Weston, the Necktie Killer. (When Will’s fate was reversed when the character was miraculously discovered to be alive in 2017, the show rehired Massey to play him.) Wilson admitted to Digest that when he got word he’d be leaving the show, “It was emotional. Everyone talks about this, but what is unique about working in daytime is that you work with everyone year-round, literally every day. There is a very familial element to it and also a very nurturing aspect to it. DAYS really felt like a second family. For me, part of what hit me the most was not being able to go to work every day to work with kind, professional, hardworking actors. It was sad to know that this wonderful period in my career was coming to a close. With that having been said, all things come to a close.”
After leaving DAYS, Wilson has worked steadily in prime-time, appearing on series like S.W.A.T., Bosch: Legacy and NCIS: Los Angeles.
Jackson originated the character of Lucky in 1993, and after he ended his first run in 1999, two other actors took over the role (first Jacob Young, then Greg Vaughan). Jackson returned from 2009-11, visited in 2015, and returned again last August. Currently, the character has been growing closer to ex-wife Elizabeth Webber as he readjusts to life in Port Charles after his long absence, and the pair has been trying to prove that Cyrus Renault is behind the recent murders of Sam McCall and Dex Heller.
