General Hospital’s Josslyn felt the Earth shift from under her this week as she realized that her year-long secret hadn’t been a secret from her mother for quite a while. Carly also felt the Earth shift (and possibly move) from under her as she learned she didn’t really know her daughter at all. As these two devastating and life-altering realizations took place, actresses Laura Wright and Eden McCoy gave mesmerizing and gut-wrenching performances that blew us away, making them Soap Central’s choices for GH performers of the week.
Super spy Josslyn
Josslyn’s turn as a WSB agent came out of nowhere for fans, as well as for her mother. She is the most unlikely agent anyone could have imagined, which is why her cover worked so well. Perhaps watching McCoy take Josslyn from precocious pre-teen to Gen Z super spy was so jarring for us precisely because we still think of her as a kid, just like her mother. But if McCoy proved anything this week, it is that Josslyn has matured, and so has the Emmy-winning actress who plays her.
Tough girl Josslyn roughed up Valentin in the same way she roughed up Nelle (Chloe Lanier) on the pier back in 2018, but McCoy’s heart-wrenching performance did not truly start until she got her mother into the kitchen, and Carly could finally see what a lifetime of being mob-adjacent had done to her college-age daughter.
While many fans know Josslyn’s need to take down Sonny (Maurice Benard) and anyone like him might be a little short-sighted, McCoy made us understand just why she feels this way. She has had a front-row seat to all the tragedy Sonny’s lifestyle has caused her family. She couldn’t quite acknowledge that Jason (Steve Burton) leads the same lifestyle, but it was also clear that this was much more personal to Joss.
McCoy showed us a young woman whose heart bleeds for her mother, but whose heart can also see the truth. Carly has been hurt by Sonny over and over and over again. Josslyn has seen her mother’s tears enough to want to do something to take them away. She is not thinking of the long-term consequences of her actions. She is just reacting to her own life experience.
Josslyn’s desperation to get both Carly and Jason to see her reasons for joining the WSB juxtaposed with her determination to stay calm and composed for the sake of her lent to McCoy’s brutally raw performance. And the mother-daughter chemistry she has always had with Laura Wright’s Carly shone right through.
General Hospital’s Carly looks in the mirror
While Carly’s anger and frustration toward Josslyn were palpable with every word out of her mouth and expression on her face, the true heartbreaking moments came when Josslyn left, barking orders that Valentin (James Patrick Stuart) had to be gone in 24 hours or else.
Watching Wright and McCoy battle was glorious as Carly did everything she could to reason with her daughter, but once alone, we could feel Carly’s hurt. And so could Valentin. As it hit Carly that Josslyn’s choices were due to her choices, even if she could justify those choices, we saw a different Carly (and so did Valentin).
Wright took the often-brash Carly, who gets herself into pickles (like Valentin in her attic for the last three months) or fights as tough as her daughter (without the Jiu-Jitsu moves), and shed that hard layer of skin to reveal a mother who could look at her own life and her daughter’s life as reflections in a mirror. The shock on her face as she absorbed the conversation with Josslyn and processed the fact that her daughter had taken more than one life, all while Carly was in the dark, spoke to us.
With Josslyn, Wright gave us a horrified and terrified mother, but alone with Valentin, Wright gave us a mature woman reflecting on her own life choices.
McCoy and Wright’s performances solidified them as the powerhouses that they are, and also proved that McCoy learned from a master, the multi-Emmy-winning actress who has played her mother for the last 10 years. Bravo, ladies!
