Killer Instincts: Jeff Kober weighs in on Cyrus' General Hospital swan song

General Hospital's Cyrus Renault is no more after five years of menacing Port Charles — even from behind bars. That means Jeff Kober's time on the soap has also come to an end.

No way out for Cyrus Renault

The writing seemed on the wall for Cyrus the moment it was revealed that he was the person who killed Sam McCall, one of the most beloved characters in GH history. No character can come back from that, especially one that started as a villain and remained one despite claiming to have found God.

Kober was surprised when he saw the script that revealed Cyrus injecting a lethal dose of Digitalis into Sam's IV while she comfortably slept in a hospital bed. However, it also helped him gain more insight into the character and the newfound religion he had found while in prison.

"When I saw that script, I said, 'Wait a minute! Don’t I get a vote?' And they said, 'No, of course not,'" Kober told Soap Opera Digest in an interview. "And I had to make it work within the realm of my logic of the character and of the world. You have to go to a certain level of crazy. The whole thing of, 'Did he find God or not?'— we lived in that world for a long time and from that perspective, it was kind of a relief to go, like, 'Oh, he’s killing people. Even if he’s doing it in the name of the Lord, still, he’s killing people!' The character made sense to me more."

With Cyrus written into a corner he couldn't get out of, Kober got to go to town in meaty scenes with Rebecca Herbst's Elizabeth. Cyrus showed up at Elizabeth's house to answer all her questions before going in for the kill. During masterfully acted scenes in Liz's dark living room, the audience learns Cyrus' motives for killing Sam — and multiple other patients whose suffering he thought he was ending.

"It was my first time working with her and she was so professional and prepared and strong," Kober said. "We really got to do the dance together, and she takes great direction — when Frank [Valentini, executive producer] or one of the directors would say, “Maybe this part of the scene is a little more about this or that,” both of us would adjust and go to different places with it. I really enjoyed working with her."

General Hospital kills off a killer

Just because Cyrus was revealed as Sam and Dex's killer, it did not mean he had to die, but that's just what happened when Josslyn got her hands on Dex's gun and figured out what he had been up to. Cyrus came at her with an ax, so Josslyn pulled the trigger. Minutes later, Cyrus took his last breath, telling Josslyn that she was the murderer now. Kober, who won a Daytime Emmy for playing Cyrus in 2022, couldn't have been more happy with the way those scenes turned out.

"I haven’t seen it, but from being in it — I’ve died many times in many different storylines, and I think this is perhaps one of my best deaths," Kober enthused. "As an actor, I would have liked to have maybe a bit more of an arc [about what] the character was going through emotionally and personally, and it wasn’t that. It was like, “Cyrus was doing something bad and he has to be stopped.” The storyline really wasn’t about Cyrus’s point of view on any of this. It was about someone else’s point of view on it. But that being said, the scenes that they gave me were just stellar and rich, and all the stuff with Elizabeth, it just couldn’t have been stronger, and the death is a great finish to it."

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