General Hospital Exclusive: Marcus Coloma Opens Up About the Health Struggles That Cut Short His Run as Nikolas

When Marcus Coloma wrapped up his run as General Hospital‘s Nikolas, few were expecting it to end quite as quickly as it did. The actor had returned from a hiatus after contracting COVID, only for us to learn shortly after that Nikolas would be departing and Coloma wouldn’t be filming his last scenes. Instead, the show brought Adam Huss back in, as he’d filled in for Coloma during his COVID bouts.

Rumors swirled about why he didn’t finish out the run, but while initial reports claimed that Coloma didn’t want to film his final scenes after learning he’d been let go, it was actually, he revealed, because of health problems.

And now the actor shares he details about what really kept him from finishing filming — and how it felt to have to step back at the last minute.

COVID itself, he tells Soaps.com in a new interview, “wasn’t that bad for me. I didn’t lose taste. I didn’t lose smell. The normal symptoms only lasted a couple of days. It was really easy in that regard. But the after effects were kind of brutal for me for a while. I got this brain fog and fatigue. That lasted a while to the point that I felt that I couldn’t memorize my lines towards the end, which thankfully, it’s gone.”

It’s been a struggle, though, and it’s only “just recently,” he shares, that “I’m really back to 100 percent. And I’m exercising again. But I was surprised at the length of the after effects of it for me. It seems to hit everybody differently. I think it’s just the thing that has to run its course, and it just takes a while for the body to figure it out.

As for not being able to film Nikolas’ final scenes, Coloma has mixed feelings about that.

“It was disappointing, because I don’t feel like I got to wrap up,” he explains. “It’s kind of like letting somebody else finish a puzzle that you’ve been working on for a while. But I think it was mitigated by the fact that it had happened before.”

He’d been recast short term a couple of times, the first because he was near somebody who’d gotten COVID. Back then, you had to isolate even if you were just exposed. Then he had to break when he contracted COVID himself and in time, those after effects made it too difficult to finish out the run. But Coloma doesn’t have hard feelings about what happened.

Daytime is an unbelievably fast-moving medium and actors need to be able to receive pages upon pages of lines and memorize them virtually overnight. If anything is impeding that, it can be almost impossible to keep going.

Huss stepped in to end Nikolas’ run at the time when Coloma had to step back.

Credit: ABC screenshot

As Coloma puts it, “General Hospital is such a well run machine and the demand is so high. So if you’re the person who is dropping the ball, it really holds the entire group up, because that delay has a ripple effect. It then causes whoever’s the last to shoot that night to be in a really bad position because now they’re trying to do some important scenes and it’s late for that crew to wait for those actors. It was disappointing, but I felt like it was the greatest thing based on the group, you know?”

It’s not always easy to do what’s best for everyone from the fans to co-stars, but the show, as they say, must go on. And Coloma understands that better than anyone. We’re just glad to hear that his battle with long COVID seems to have finally come to a close and he’s finally back to himself once again!