General Hospital (GH) star Maurice Benard (Sonny Corinthos) recently welcomed filmmaker and actor Tarek Tohme onto his podcast to discuss the realities of mental health, grief, and survival in Hollywood.
Facing Anxiety Head-On
Benard created his State of Mind podcast as a platform for open dialogue surrounding mental illness. During the interview, he admitted his own past struggles with severe anxiety.
“When I met you I was in bad anxiety,” Benard recalled. The two worked together on the indie film Hold On, where Benard played Tohme’s father.
Growing Up Guarded
Tohme remembered feeling emotionally blocked during his youth. During his chat with Maurice Benard, he explained that as a kid, he tried writing poetry to describe how he kept “all my emotions inside.”
He said he wrote a poem while he was in the fifth grade, during a difficult period in his childhood. Additionally, he suffered from teasing and bullying because of his name that other kids turned into “TK Tomato.”
The Heavy Weight of Loss
The conversation also turned to grief and how difficult it can be to process loss at a young age. Many young adults hit their twenties without an emotional understanding of how to cope.
Tohme knows this pain firsthand. He recalled how he lost two close childhood friends to overdoses within two months.
Loss seemed to trigger his worst bouts of depression and along with that came feelings of guilt. “I felt guilt because I didn’t answer that phone call,” Tohme shared regarding a missed call from his friend Skyler right before his death.
Scary Times When An Acquaintance Died
Maurice Benard also heard Tarek Tohme reveal how stressed he was when a well-known personality passed away and that happened when the media attention intensified following the death of Michael Jackson.
If you didn’t know, Tohme’s late father, Dr. Tohme Tohme, served as Michael Jackson’s official manager during his final years. A 2009 article by The Guardian called the senior Tohme a “stranger to the music business” who tried to save Jackson’s Neverland ranch from foreclosure.
When Jackson died that year there was plenty of media speculation and millions of people mourned him, so a lot of misinformation arrived and it spread very fast.
Mistaken Identity
Some outlets even mistakenly identified Tohme’s father as Jackson’s personal physician and paparazzi swarmed around the family home. Tohme said to Maurice, “It was like trauma compounded on top of trauma.” He remembered crying in his bathroom as reporters circled outside.
It wasn’t only the scary public scrutiny but sadness as well because he said that Jackson had personally encouraged him to pursue film directing during a 2008 Thanksgiving dinner. They had watched Kung Fu Panda together.
What Helped Him?
General Hospital fans who follow the real-life Sonny Corinthos learned that for Tohme, Hollywood could feel like a harsh place. To cope with that, he found something else and became very good at it. He started fighting in the MMA.
“Stepping in the cage was my therapy,” Tohme said. In a room filled with thousands of spectators, he learned that combat sports demand total presence and concentration.
Maurice Benard praised Tohme’s outlook and related to the value of physical training. An avid boxing enthusiast himself, the General Hospital star said he understood how combat sports can provide focus alongside acting and other creative outlets.
Given Benard’s long-running openness about living with bipolar disorder and anxiety, he was able to relate closely to Tohme’s experiences.
The GH star and his guest also talked about how being stressed or in a state of panic sometimes feels like trying to get through life without a road map. Many fans get it that talking about their problems seems to help a lot.
Viewers React
In the comments section, many GH and MMA fans appreciated the honesty between the two men and they seemed grateful and happy to hear that when they acted together, Tarek felt that Maurice really brought his real-life experiences to the table when he acted.
Plus, they liked the fact that the two men found a “soulful connection.”
One viewer said, “What an excellent interview Tarek…it looks like you’ll do fine in this uncertain Hollywood life and you will always remain true in this world full of fakeness and betrayal.”
Meanwhile, other GH fans told the veteran actor that his interview with Tarek came across as “truly heartfelt, organic, and authentic.”
Your thoughts? Join the discussion and come back here for more General Hospital cast news and updates.