General Hospital's Brook Lynn is Gio's mom — Amanda Setton breaks it all down

The General Hospital reveal that shocked nobody finally happened: The audience finally has confirmation that Gio is indeed Brook Lynn's long-lost son, but neither character knows it.

General Hospital anvils

GH had been dropping hints for months that Brook Lynn (Amanda Setton) had a child as a teen. When Brook Lynn and Lois (Rena Sofer) finally discussed the situation two weeks ago, nobody was surprised. In fact, fans were just waiting for someone to please acknowledge that family friend Gio Palmieri (Giovanni Mazza) was the son that Brook Lynn gave up for adoption.

Lois did just that when she visited Marty (Michael E. Knight) and hired him as her attorney to ensure the adoption remained sealed, and Gio and Brook Lynn never learned that they were related. The fact that they live in the same house and have been growing closer every day could also complicate things.

Gio has become Brook Lynn's young confidante while she has become the college student's mentor. It's a sticky situation indeed, especially now that Brook Lynn knows that Chase is sterile and they can't have a baby the old-fashioned way. According to Amanda Setton, the complexities of this storyline explain many of Brook Lynn's actions over the last few years.

Brook Lynn the mom

When Setton returned from her maternity leave toward the end of 2020, Brook Lynn was sporting a fake baby belly and claiming to be pregnant with Valentin Cassadine's (James Patrick Stuart) child. When she needed a real baby to play the part of her fake baby, Maxie (Kirsten Storms) loaned Brook Lynn her newborn while trying to keep the infant hidden from her dastardly dad, Peter August (Wes Ramsey). Brook Lynn named the baby Bailey and took care of her as her own for nearly a year.

"I do think that we now have a bit more color as to why she has such a strong connection to children," Setton told Soap Opera Digest in an interview. "I think what’s evident in the coming months of this Brook Lynn baby storyline is that she really had to lock this information away inside of her and compartmentalize in order to survive emotionally. I’ve enjoyed playing this duality of, like, almost a realization that her deep yearning to be a mother that has sort of played inside of her throughout the story these last few years was actually her exercising a part of herself that was already tapped into in some small way, but that she wasn’t even conscious of."

Playing with General Hospital history

Setton acknowledged that GH has altered character history a bit to tell this story, but she is okay with the show taking such liberties as it's something soaps are apt to do. Dante (Dominic Zamprogna) has always been several years older than Brook Lynn, but now we are told they were at summer camp together as teens, where Brook Lynn became pregnant.

"I think when it comes to the camp stuff, I think the way Dom and I have reconciled it in our minds is that [our characters are] not exactly the same age; we may be two years apart or three years apart, or, you know, I was a freshman, he was a junior," she said. "I mean, there’s definitely some difference in age. I do think there is a tad of a suspension of disbelief [required], but then I also feel like, I don’t know — is it that big of an age difference."

Dante has no idea that he is also living in the same house with a son he never knew he had, but when he finds out, that's when the real soap begins.

Catch all-new episodes of General Hospital weekdays on ABC and Hulu.