ABC Actress Leaving Show After ‘Much Longer Run’ Than She Expected

Eva LaRue is saying goodbye to Port Charles.

After making her debut on General Hospital in February 2024, LaRue’s character Natalia Ramirez will be written out of the long-running ABC soap opera this week, the actress confirmed to Soap Opera Digest.

“I was originally only supposed to be on the show for a couple of months,” LaRue, who previously starred as neurologist Dr. Maria Santos Grey on All My Children, told the outlet. “And it ended up being a much longer run, which was great — and really fun because there are so many All My Children actors there and so it felt like home.”

LaRue’s character was introduced to the show and viewers as “this mom villain,” the disapproving and homophobic mother of Blaze, she recalled. Although the character was initially only supposed to serve as “a conduit to the storyline and not really be there for very long,” LaRue explained that it was “really tough [to reverse that] when they were like, ‘Well, we’ve got her here, might as well keep her!’” While the writers attempted to “rehabilitate” the actress’ character, LaRue said “people just weren’t buying it,” and she began to sense in January that her journey on General Hospital was coming to an end.

“People just weren’t buying it, because they just hated my character so much. I was so vilified that no matter what [the writers] did, it just wasn’t a solid enough rehabilitation that they were gonna buy me with Sonny. And so when they finally let that idea go, I realized, ‘Okay, I’m probably not much longer for this world,’” she said. “I started to feel it in January… all of a sudden, I have these scenes in January where, because Natalia had lied about her ex-husband [Sidwell] and broken his trust, Sonny was like, ‘We can’t be friends anymore.’ And I thought, ‘Uh-oh, there we go,’ because that [relationship with Sonny] was kind of my character’s only lifeline.”

Natalia’s exit from the show was set up in Monday’s latest episode, which saw the character ingesting a significant combination of pills and alcohol.

While LaRue is sad to see her time in Port Charles come to an end, she said she “had a blast at General Hospital. I loved being there and I had a lot of really great scenes and I loved everybody that I got to work with. It was just an awesome experience, and I was really glad that I got to stay longer than I was supposed to.”

New episodes of General Hospital air weekdays on ABC.