Correctly referencing a player character

Hello guys, I have created a player character and I assigned to him another player character as “parent”. I made a HUD UI to show the health of the player character. I know how to do it with “casting” but I want to avoid it and instead be able to get a character reference of the “parent” as a variable to use it in various blueprints.

I’ve already created a new variable called Player1_ParentRef and made it of the same object type. But it’s not recognizable from the HUD UI. When I set it up with casting it works ok.

What am I missing here?

Can somebody give me any pointers, please?

Thanks a lot