Steve Burton said the Daytime Emmy reel drawing so much attention around his Outstanding Lead Actor bid was not built around the Monica death scenes fans expected to see. Some of those moments were included, he said, but they were not the main material in the reel.
Burton made the remarks on a recent episode of That's Awesome, with Bradford Anderson and Giovanni Mazza, as interest builds ahead of the Daytime Emmy Awards on October 30, 2026, at the Hollywood Palladium. He is the only General Hospital star in the category, and the nomination had already felt tied to the emotional work after Monica died.
That is why the reel question matters. Burton has been part of General Hospital since 1991, when he first took on the role of Jason Quartermaine. Five years later, a car accident turned Jason Quartermaine into Jason Morgan, and his run has been defined by those major changes. But Burton said the scenes that caught fans' attention were not easy to use as the centerpiece because of how they were put together.
He said the footage could not anchor the reel because the production was built to include everyone in the scene, not to isolate him in a way that would let the performance breathe on its own. “There were no true close-ups really because they had to include everybody in the scene, which is totally fine,” Burton said, adding that the material was a “culmination of my experience there, my time with Leslie, my relationship with Leslie, my relationship with people who were in the scene with me, the feeling of the crew mourning her also,” and that “It was a lot, man. It was emotionally a lot.”
The scenes themselves were the 2025 funeral material that became the culmination of Jason and Monica's on-screen relationship, the same stretch of story that followed Leslie Charleson's death on January 12, 2025, at 79. Burton's point was not that those scenes lacked weight. It was that the way they were produced made them less suitable as the bulk of an Emmy reel, even if they remained the most talked-about part of his recent work.
That leaves the real question for viewers and voters: the footage that defined the emotion of the storyline was not necessarily the footage that defined his submission. Burton has now said the reel was shaped as much by structure as by feeling, and that is the distinction that matters as the Daytime Emmy Awards get closer.
