Soap Opera
‘General Hospital’s’ Steve Burton Reveals a Shocking Truth About His Daytime Emmy Reel
Steve Burton explains why Monica funeral scenes were excluded from his 2026 Daytime Emmy reel and what moments he chose to submit for Outstanding Lead Actor.
When the Daytime Emmy Awards are presented on October 30, 2026, at the Hollywood Palladium, Steve Burton will be the only General Hospital star competing in the Outstanding Lead Actor category. When his nomination was announced, fans weren’t surprised due to some career-defining work last year after Jason’s mother, Monica (Leslie Charleson), died. However, those are not the scenes that dominated Burton’s Emmy reel.
Steve Burton Explains His Emmy Choice
On a recent episode of his podcast, That’s Awesome, Burton and co-host Bradford Anderson (Damian Spinelli) interviewed Giovanni Mazza, who plays Gio Palmieri, who is also up for a Daytime Emmy in the Emerging Talent category. When the two actors began to discuss this year’s awards, Mazza was sure that he knew what Burton used on his reel, but the veteran actor had a surprise for the younger performer, who had just praised his work.
“I appreciate that, but what’s crazy was that wasn’t in my reel,” Burton said, before clarifying that some of those scenes were on his reel, but he couldn’t use the bulk of them due to the way the scenes were edited and produced. “There were no true close-ups really because they had to include everybody in the scene, which is totally fine.”
However, Burton still sees those scenes as something special, even if he couldn’t make them the focal point of his Emmy reel. He felt they honored Charleson, who passed away on January 12, 2025, at the age of 79.
“[They were a] culmination of my experience there, my time with Leslie, my relationship with Leslie, my relationship with people who were in the scene with me, the feeling of the crew mourning her also,” he admitted. “It was a lot, man. It was emotionally a lot.”
Those scenes were also heartbreaking for fans to watch, having followed the relationship between Jason and Monica since Burton first took on the role of Jason Quartermaine in 1991. Five years later, a car accident turned Jason Quartermaine into Jason Morgan, with a brain-damaged Jason rejecting his mother. The funeral scenes in 2025 also served as the culmination of Jason and Monica’s on-screen relationship, which had healed itself through the years.
