General Hospital’s John J. York Opens Up About His Emotional Return — But Where In the World Has Mac *Really* Been?

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As the t-shirts General Hospital had made up say: Mac is back! John J. York returned to work after his cancer diagnosis for the first time since he took a hiatus from the show back in September. He was first diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome and smoldering multiple myeloma back in December of 2022, but after fighting back and receiving a blood stem cell transplant, York has finally brought Mac back home.

As he put it when talking about the transplant with Good Morning America, “My cells are now fighting each other and battling each other and getting to know each other.”

He spoke with Soap Opera Digest about the whole experience, admitting that the outpouring of support he got was humbling “because I just feel — not like I’m a nothing burger, but I’m just a guy that got really lucky getting a job on a TV show in 1991. And here I am, still able to be working after 33 years. It’s a miracle.”

His return to the show, York says, “was great and it was seamless. Just like when I made the announcement that I was leaving the show for a while and everybody came up to me and gave me a big hug, I came in and went to my dressing room and got called up for blocking and I got up [to the stage] and just got an amazing hug from everybody that I was working with.”

The emotion we all saw onscreen was very much real. And to cap it all off, “I got a great, emotional, tearful hug from Kristina [Wagner, Felicia] that lasted quite a while. It was good to be back, you know? We had fun. They were fun scenes and we were off to the races!”

Mac, though, was far less forthcoming with where he’s been than York has been. He did a lot of catching up with everyone, making it seem like he had little to know contact with his loved ones, and even Maxie had no clue where he’d disappeared off to.

Thanks to the nature of daytime storytelling, it’s easy enough to have characters pop in and out. “It works because they can just mention it in a brief blurb: ‘Where’s Mac?’” York noted to SOD. “‘Oh, Mac’s in Argentina, on a case with Frisco, and who knows how long he’ll be away,’ you know?”

Update: Mac filled Felicia in on the fact that he was, indeed, running around with Frisco. You can read about it in today’s recap. And if that’s the case, we can kind of see why he’d keep mum to Maxie, especially since, as she pointed out, he hates secrets.

Speaking of which, now that he’s back, Cody’s little secret is bound to come out sooner or later!