General Hospital Exclusive: Robert Palmer Watkins Shares the ‘Brutal’ Truth About His Firing as Dillon
“You’re fired!” Nobody wants to hear those dreaded words, especially in daytime TV, but Robert Palmer Watkins is revisiting that less-than-fun moment of what it was like to find out he had been let go from his contract as Dillon Quartermaine on General Hospital in 2017. Telling Soaps.com that he was “totally shocked” because he “had no idea it was coming,” the way it all went down was very dramatic — and there’s still one Scooby mystery surrounding the news.
“I was shooting a movie, so I was taking a couple week break from General Hospital to shoot the last three days, and I actually found out that they were releasing me from contract while I was on my lunch break,” he explains. “So that was pretty brutal, and I was trying to hold it together.” It was already a bad day, but it was about to get worse: the news somehow made its way to the press. Watkins promises that he had nothing to do with it — remember, he was working on set, far away from the shenanigans in Port Charles.
“I don’t know how, but it leaked out literally the day I found out,” Watkins shares. “It was all over the internet. So I don’t know how that happened. And I even got a call from General Hospital, they were not happy that it was leaked out, and I was like, ‘I didn’t leak it.’”
While you might think Watkins would be bitter about the experience — nah, he calls his time on General Hospital “amazing.” He’s “grateful” for the doors it opened for him, but he wanted to make an exit from the soap on his own terms — and we don’t blame him one bit.
