A is for Amazing

Michael Logan

TV Guide, 9/25/99

Welcome back to daytime soaps, A Martinez!

    Ending months of speculation that he was joining the casts of either One Life to Live or The Young and the Restless, A Martinez has decided instead to check into General Hospital.  The daytime superstar - who won an Emmy as crimestopper Cruz Castillo on the now-defunct Santa Barbara - makes his first appearance on GH October 1. 

   And he may require some divine intervention:  Martinez will play Roy DiLucca, a shady heartthrob last seen on the soap in 1979, who was shot to death by security guards - in full view of the audience - when he attempted to assassinate a senator.  At the time of his demise, DiLucca was the boyfriend of Jackie Zeman's character Bobbie Spencer, so it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Martinez and Zeman will be matched romantically (Julian Stone, the actor who plays Bobbie's current beau, Jerry Jacks, has been fired). 

    What is puzzling is why Martinez, one of the busiest actors in prime time, would want to return to the suds.  "In the last year, I did five TV-movies on location and it just became nuts," says the Los Angeles-based Martinez, who has three children, Cody, 11, Devon, 8, and Ren, 4.  "My work was making it impossible for me to maintain the kind of hands-on relationship I want with my little ones.  I need to come home to my house every night and look into their eyes." 

   Besides, Martinez notes, "My wife, Leslie, says I was the happiest I've ever been when I was on Santa Barbara."  The actor followed his SB stint with a role as single-dad Daniel Morales on L.A. Law and countless TV-movies (his most recent, Cruel Justice, aired August 29).  He also had a role as Coop, a bomb expert and Ally Walker's lover on Profiler.  But soap work, he says, "is so intense and demanding that it keeps you on edge, it keeps you feeling alive.  As busy as I was when I left soaps, I felt myself losing the edge as the months went by.  I'm looking forward to that mental 'perk' again."

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