Decades later, Jack Wagner still can’t escape his breakout role.

The actor says the audience’s obsession with his current show, When Calls the Heart, is similar to what he experienced while he was starring in the soap opera that gave him his start. “It does remind me a bit of General Hospital in the ’80s,” he said of WCTH when he recently stopped by the Melrose Place podcast Still the Place. “That was my big break. That fan base of that soap opera is still there.”

Wagner explained that fans’ attachment to his General Hospital role transcends that of all his other characters. “I still get called Frisco probably more than anything,” he said, referring to his GH character, Frisco Jones. “When a fan base starts to fall in love with the characters, it’s very real for them. It reminds me a little bit of the GH fans back in the ’80s.”

Wagner portrayed Frisco on and off from 1983 to 1995, and later returned to the show in 2013.

The actor said that he thinks When Calls the Heart has enjoyed popularity on the Hallmark Channel because its historical setting offers an escape from our contemporary climate. “I think this show resonates with people given our political temperature in the country for the last 10 years or more,” he hypothesized. “I think people look for something that’s safe. We don’t show blood, we don’t show sex, we don’t show nudity, we don’t use profanity, but yet we can shoot a gun.”

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Wagner also indicated that he was ready to say goodbye to Melrose Place, on which he also starred, by the time it wrapped its 7th season in 1999.

“I think we can all feel when something may be coming to an end on a series, and it felt like it there,” he said of the 1990s Fox sudser. “So I felt really honored to have the last scene of the show to be Heather [Locklear] and I having bought this island and faked our death and doing our vows and walking off on the beach in the sunset. [It] was like, wow, what an honor to kind of carry the old guard into the last scene of the show, right?”

Wagner’s WCTH costar Melissa Gilbert discussed her onscreen romance with the actor in an interview with Entertainment Weekly last month. “I would love to see what happens with Bill and Georgie going forward, because it is left as a romantic cliffhanger — will-they, won’t-they? Are they, aren’t they?” she said. “I also think it’s really great to portray the beginning of a romantic relationship with two people our age. Just because you’re over 60 doesn’t mean you’re dead.”

Listen to the full Still the Place episode with Jack Wagner above.