A General Hospital spokesperson confirms to Soap Opera Digest that Evan Hofer is out at the show, where he has played the role of Dex Heller since May 5, 2022. In what is being characterized as a storyline-dictated move, Dex was killed off on the Friday, December 13th episode.
“I found out probably a few weeks before we filmed the scene,” Hofer told Entertainment Weekly. “Honestly, I was just excited to find out what the story was going to be, and wanted to hear how that was going to go. So my last few weeks were really just trying to soak in how much I loved playing Dex, and how much I loved all the people over at GH. I had such a wonderful time there over the last two-and-a-half years, and I was just trying to make sure that I do justice to the character in those final episodes.”
This Is The End
Earlier in the week, the character — who this year joined the ranks of the Port Charles Police Department after an earlier stint on mob boss Sonny’s payroll — was stabbed in the back at Rice Plaza by a gloved mystery assailant. He was whisked into surgery at General Hospital, and his medical team expressed confidence that he would fully heal within a matter of weeks. His lady love, Josslyn, was concerned that her powerful former stepfather, Sonny, may have been behind the attack on her beau, but Dex tried to soothe her, and assured her that he was very much on the mend. But soon, and without warning, Dex went into cardiac arrest and died. His PCPD colleague, Anna, and Josslyn, who had dropped in at the hospital to check on him, were left stunned when Dr. Isaiah Gannon broke the sad news that despite their best efforts to revive Dex, he had not survived — and Joss, of course, was particularly devastated by her boyfriend’s passing.
Dex’s demise is shocking — but it might have been less so if it didn’t follow the same pattern as the recent death of Sam McCall, who similarly survived an operation (in her case, donating part of her liver to Lulu) only to suddenly go into cardiac arrest and die. On this past Monday’s episode, viewers learned that this was no fluke — Cyrus Renault had injected her IV bag with a deadly dose of digitalis.
After Dex’s death was pronounced, the hospital’s head nurse, Elizabeth Baldwin, sighed, “This isn’t right. You’re the second person to die like this. It just doesn’t make any sense.” She concluded, “Something very wrong is going on here.” All in all, it certainly looks like Cyrus has struck again — especially since the same day Cyrus was revealed on-air to be Sam’s killer, Dex confronted him about seeing him at the hospital, on the same floor as Sam and Lulu, on the day Sam died. It stands to reason that Cyrus had reason to want to shut Dex up permanently, to ensure he didn’t connect the dots between Cyrus’s proximity to Sam and Sam’s death.
Disney/Christine Bartolucci
Another One Bites The Dust: Something about Dex’s death doesn’t sit right with Elizabeth (Rebecca Herbst).
Off And Running
Getting tapped to play Dex almost three years ago marked Hofer’s first foray into the world of daytime. He noted to Soap Opera Digest soon after his debut, “I’d actually had a few auditions for some different soaps over the years and for some different roles on General Hospital, and it just worked out this time. The stars aligned!”
Hofer shared that he was especially grateful for the gig in the wake of the pandemic, which had made acting jobs more scarce. “It’s been really incredible,” he mused. “The pandemic was obviously really hard for a lot of people, and to be able to kind of start coming out of that and have work to go to every day with such wonderful people — the entire crew at the show is so fantastic and so lovely to be around, it just makes going to work every day a joy. During the pandemic, I had way too much free time to be sitting around, so I am more than happy to be doing all this work, to spend my weekends working on my scripts to make sure that I can do the best job possible for all the fans and for everybody else that puts in so much work on the show.”
Early in his Port Charles life, most of Hofer’s scenes were opposite Daytime Emmy-winning veteran Maurice Benard (Sonny). At the time, Dex was secretly working with Michael to take down Sonny, but off-camera, Benard was a mentor to Hofer and showed him the ropes. “I am really grateful that so much of my stuff early on was with Mo,” he noted. “This is a new medium for me and I’ve been able to learn from him. Mo really took me under his wing on day one.”
As Dex’s storyline progressed, his sometimes rocky romance with Josslyn became a focal point of his on-screen life. “Dex has never loved anyone the way he loves Joss before, or had anyone love him the way Joss does,” Hofer observed to Digest in 2024. “He would shoulder as much pain as he possibly could to prevent her from pain. He loves her so much that he’ll put himself through anything, he’ll put his own feelings and his own well-being aside for her to try to protect her as much as he can. Her well-being and her heart are far more important to him than his own life. He loves her more than life itself.”
Disney/Christine Bartolucci
Didn’t We Almost Have It All? Dex and Josslyn (Eden McCoy) in happier times.
Parting Words
Hofer, who was popular among his castmates, will be missed at the GH studio. Tabyana Ali (Trina) tells Digest exclusively, “I was really hurt when he told me [he was leaving]; I kind of got a little teary. I mean, I am so grateful to General Hospital for bringing him to me. I’ve made really close friends with people here, like Avery [Pohl, ex-Esme] and Eden [McCoy] and Evan and now Gio [Giovanni Mazza, Gio] and I’m so grateful for them all, but Evan leaving really made me cry a little bit. We were sitting in his room and just kind of hugging and I was like, ‘Oh, no, what do I do?’ Mostly because I felt like I just wasn’t going to see my energy partner around here anymore! But I am going to see him outside of here. We’re already hanging out, so not much is really going to change except that I’m not going to see him at work. We do still talk and we still hang out and I think that’s what makes me so happy, is that we made a tight enough friendship where it won’t have to end once he leaves, and it continues outside of work. It’s me, Evan, Avery, Gio and now we’re bringing Jens [Austin Astrup, Kai] into the situation and we’re all gonna hang out. So, it’s sad for me, but because I get to see him outside of work, it’s not too sad.”
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