General Hospital’s Marcus Coloma Looks Back in Disbelief at the Angry Young Man He Was: ‘Everyone Thought I Was Crazy, and So Did I’

“I felt so much emotion as a kid.”

We all have a past and sometimes it’s hard thinking back and talking about it in the present. However, that’s exactly what General Hospital’s Marcus Coloma (Nikolas) did during a recent appearance on Maurice Benard’s (Sonny) video podcast State of Mind. The conversation started off about the unconditional love the actor has for his daughter before Coloma thought back to his own childhood.

“I love my parents and it’s not even that I don’t unconditionally love them but for whatever reason from a very young age, I’ve always been like I need to not be a mama’s boy, I don’t want to be a daddy’s boy, I want to be like an adventurer,” he shared candidly, so much so that he’d been trying to “get out of the house” at around seven years old.

He made it very clear how much he truly loves his parents and talked about visiting with them recently. “It’s just kind of like… I wanted to be the pirate… I wanted guitar… I ran away from my home when I was five years old.” Not only that, he got his sister and brother to run away with him too.

“And again, it had nothing to do with the treatment of my parents,” Coloma explained. “They’re the coolest people you’ll ever meet. I just wanted to hit the road. It’s weird… I think it’s the artist… I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently.”

And being an artist, you have to be motivated and what motivates the actor is “creating things.” Even as a little kid, he found that grocery stores could be a magical place… getting into a car could be as well. To his younger self, it was “a spaceship,” he described. “I’d get in the car and I’d play with the air conditioner vents like I was in a spaceship.”

It was all about the adventure… “Watching Goonies and Stand By Me… I was just like, I love parents, but you can’t have an adventure with parents. I wanted to get in danger, I don’t think an adventure exists without an element of danger and if I’ve got my mom and dad there making it safe, it’s not an adventure.”

That surely makes sense, as we can all look back and attest to those moments. As kids, we never thought, “Hey, let’s wait until mom and dad come into the room and then we’ll push each other off the couch into the ocean.” You get where we’re going here…

Anyway, back to Coloma… It wasn’t until he turned 17 when he moved out for real and went to a junior college in Santa Rosa. “My two roommates were hooked on crack but I stayed away from drugs then I dropped out because I fell in love with this girl. I just ultimately knew school wasn’t for me. I couldn’t really read, honestly,” he revealed. “I hadn’t finished a book, even though I’d gotten great grades. I can read now but I couldn’t at the time.”

After Coloma dropped out of college he briefly moved back home before moving to Los Angeles at 18. However, he didn’t go there with the intent to become an actor. For about three months he’d been watching a lot of Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis and Tom Cruise movies and just seeing the rage in Gibson’s character reminded him of how he felt in his youth.

More: Soap fave says goodbye… for now

“I felt so much emotion as a kid and everyone thought I was like crazy and so did I for awhile, maybe a chemical imbalance,” he stated. “Me and my mom would get in these crazy fights. Me and my dad wouldn’t because I was afraid of my dad even though he’s a sweetheart, he’s a very big guy and scary. But my brother… I pulled a knife on my brother because he would baby… like, there was this side of me that was explosive and rage and crazy.” Thinking back, Coloma didn’t know “what to do with all of that” and continued, “I was either very sweet and polite or I was exploding. One to 100.”

Seeing Mel Gibson playing an adult who was expressing the things he had felt, and at the same time making it appear “cool,” that’s what led him to say, “Okay, I’m just going to go try it.”

In hindsight, acting was a spiritual journey for the soap star who was “trying to figure out humanity, himself, mental health… all of these things that inevitably you do explore as an actor.” He talked about how actors have to reverse engineer emotions in order to get to a certain place and affirmed, “You’re constantly looking at relationships and human behavior, good guys, bad guys.”

For more, watch the segment here:

Then view the dark history of Coloma’s character’s family in our Cassadine photo gallery below.

Video credit: State Of Mind with Maurice Benard/YouTube