He's handsome, has tons of money, a potent ego - and he's being eaten alive by a deadly addiction. "Just another Quartermaine," you might say.

But A.J. is this close to either healing himself or completely self-destructing.

Now that A.J. has admitted to the public that he caused the accident that left his brother Jason a changed man, is he closer to recovery or to implosion?

General Hospital star Sean Kanan, who plays A.J., believes that revealing his lies to his family may be the first step toward sobriety. "He's had it with the lies that permeate his family," the actor says. "One thing that A.J. is able to be is a kind of beacon of truth and honesty. 'This is who I am. I'm an alcoholic, I'm a drunk, and I've done these rotten, horrible things, but I'm not going to cover this s--t up anymore.'

"But in doing so, he won't allow anyone else to lie either. I think he's reached a point where he's disgusted with himself and the situation that he's had to live with in his family. It's 'the truth shall set you free' philosophy."

Kanan has sympathy for his character's plight. "He's tried to fight it, he's tried to go to the meetings, he's tried to do the right thing... and he can't. Part of A.J. thinks that maybe he's constitutionally weaker in character than, certainly, Jason. On a lot of levels, he feels almost resigned to being the black sheep alcoholic.

"Yet there's another part of him that still wants to fight back and get control of his life," Kanan insists. "So there is this internal tempest going on.

"I've always thought that confusion comes from a lack of clarity," the actor adds. "I don't think that A.J. is clear whether he wants to continue to fight the good fight and try to be sober, or just resign himself to the fact that he's a drunk and that everybody has limited expectations of him and to fulfill their lowest expectations."

That said, Kanan reveals that a change in A.J.'s behavior is coming, though he won't give away too many details. "They say that one of the reasons that alcoholics eventually do get sober is because of an epiphany or cathartic spiritual event. They're able to surrender some of their control.

"Without telling you what it is, something is going to happen that is going to be the catalyst for A.J. to have a shift in how he feels about his use of alcohol. It is going to be something profound that affects him at the core," Kanan reveals.

Portraying an alcoholic takes an incredible amount of focus for an actor. But Kanan is remarkably well-prepared for this difficult task. "Playing drunk is just one more layer of the onion, so to speak, that you have to add on to the performance," he explains.

"It's concentration intensive, let's put it that way. The trick to playing drunk is that when you're really drunk, you try to overcome it and appear as sober as you can be. Sometimes drunkenness doesn't always manifest in being depressed. Sometimes it manifests in being manic and being very up and openly emotive. So I try to mix it up and play it differently all the time. There's always rapid emotional changes that occur. The pendulum swings from one extreme to the other emotionally," he says.

"But I like playing it. I think that it's obviously a socially relevant issue. And here it's being treated accurately and it's not being condensed."