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The young women of Port Charles on General Hospital are just as interesting to follow as all the other characters. These are the true millennials of the show and generally exhibit a lot of the same problems this demographic does in the real world.

Well, not always since General Hospital definitely isn’t the real world. The character of Nelle Hayes, though, is certainly one of the least liked women in this fictional town. Almost everyone in Port Charles despises her, including many viewers.

Villains on this level usually only exist in the MCU, but they sometimes happen in the soap opera universe. Audiences might have enough of Nelle as well after several years of seeing her constantly making the lives of her fellow peers miserable.

Who plays Nelle on ‘General Hospital’?

'General Hospital'
‘General Hospital’ | Rick Rowell/Walt Disney Television via Getty Images

It’s Chloe Lanier who’s played Nelle since she was first introduced in 2016. In real life, Lanier is very likable, if maybe concerned about how audiences perceive her in real life. Fortunately, she’s acted on dozens of other TV shows and been in movies.

After five years in the role of Nelle, though, there’s always the danger of being stereotyped as the mean girl of General Hospital. Lanier left the role for a while in 2018, yet came back for guest appearances multiple times since then.

As of this season, Lanier is still playing Nelle, including making her as hated as ever. A recent preview for an episode shows her squaring off with some of her enemies: Willow and Sasha.

During a confrontation scene in a restaurant, Nelle is told to leave Charlie’s Pub by Willow and Sasha. Nelle gets a drink thrown in her face for making a nasty comment about her son.

Nelle apparently isn’t going anywhere

A line from Nelle in the above scene from General Hospital has her telling Willow and Sasha she isn’t going anywhere and to get used to it. Behavior like that is maybe a lot of fun from a soap opera point of view. Regardless, being this bad can also start to wear thin after a while.

Not that she didn’t have a couple of friends to balance things out for a while. Those who watch the show regularly know Nelle was friendly enough with Brad Cooper (no, not the actor) and Josslyn Jacks. This was mostly due to latter friends being naive to how devious Nelle really was.

Those friends finally disowned her when they realized she was always betraying people in her orbit. It seems she’s always linking up with someone and destroying their lives as she did with police officer Harrison Chase after an affair.

So what will become of Nelle, and can General Hospital keep the character fun rather than annoying?

Nelle’s already a convicted criminal

Before Lanier temporarily left the Nelle role, the character was arrested for murdering her ex-fiancé, Zachary Grant. Going to prison for murder would seem to be for life, outside of Nelle somehow being released when she returned to Port Charles earlier this year.

In reality, this wouldn’t make much sense, other than being described as parole. In the soap opera world, it’s just a convenience to have a character make a memorable re-entrance as they usually do. During her return, it’s found out she’d married Hank Archer before he died, making her a young widow already.

After the most recent plot point had Nelle ending up behind bars again, it’s put in doubt whether Lanier will continue to play Nelle for a while. Soap opera analysts keep pointing out Nelle keeps popping up here and there, so it may be an on-again/off-again situation for Lanier in playing the role.

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