Chit Chat Gal got to spend a few minutes with Zach Braff and Bill Lawrence chatting about all things 'Scrubs. The 7th and 'final' season of 'Scrubs' kicks off Thursday, October 25th following 'The Office' on NBC.
Where did the original idea of Scrubs come from?
Bill Lawrence: The original idea of Scrubs was there is a guy named Jon Doris who is a medical advisor on the show and his name is J.D. And we call him Real J.D. when he’s here on the set. We call him Real and he’s one of my best friends from college. And he became a doctor. He’s actually a notable cardiologist out here in LA.
We were just drinking some beers and he was telling me about his internship. And, you know, he’s one of the funnier guys I knew in college and it just struck me that, you know, here on American TV we like our doctors to be very serious and they yell the word stat a lot and they burst through doors a lot.
When I was talking to him, you know, he’s still the same funny guy and he was just talking to me about all the weird personalities and situations, and, you know, and how, you know, how they use humor to get by in the hospitals. And I just thought it would be a good TV show.
I have since, systematically stolen every funny medical story I can from all my friends that are physicians. And one of the things we take pride in on the show is that all the, you know, all the medical stuff — even though we exaggerate it for comedy — is real.
What has been your favorite episode so far and your favorite moment on or off screen?
Bill Lawrence: Z.B., you want to go first? Or do you want me to?
Zach Braff: There’s so many – I mean, that’s a really hard question to ask. But I guess because it’s most recent, I would say the musical was the most fun to do. And then I – and then, you know, I really like the ones I direct just because I have so much more invested in them.
I really like the Wizard of Oz and the one that – I don’t know which one it was called, but the one where Donald and I go on a quest to find Heather Graham so I can – so J.D. can have sex with her.
Bill Lawrence: I like to respond – really, I like to, you know, when we bridge the gap between kind of broad, goofy comedy and emotional episodes, so my two fav – I like the one at the beginning of the first year of the show because it has so much meaning to me because we had three different patients and they all died. Each character had a patient. We killed all of them. And – because I thought it was a way to tell people that might watch the show early on that it was going to be different than your average sitcom. And I liked the same way where we killed Brendan Fraser. I like it when we kill people.
I liked it when we killed Brendan Fraser on the show because I thought it was, you know, I thought it was just as good as any dramas out there. And on the comedy side, there was some weird fantasy about Donald Faison and Judy Reyes raising a pumpkin as if it were their baby. It really made me laugh.
And then I have a favorite joke. I don’t know why I’m just rattling this off. My favorite joke is Sarah Chalke is putting on red – bright red lipstick and she says to John McGinley — Dr. Cox — she says, “Does this lipstick make me look like a clown?” And he says, “No, it makes you look like a prostitute that caters exclusively to clowns.”
And that was one of my favorite jokes of all time because of how sad Sarah looked when he said it to her.
Bill Lawrence: Zach, I’ll take this. I’m joking. Go ahead.
Zach Braff: I think that probably has something to do with my personality. I mean, there’s a lot of me in that. And I like playing a character that, you know, is sort of the straight man to the world around him. And so I guess if there was a common thing in the film characters I’ve done it is that – maybe it’s because I do such broad, goofy stuff here that I was looking to do something else. But, you know, I like being the sort of – I like the character of the introverted guy, you know, self-examining his own life and learning about himself through, you know, other people. And I guess there’s a lot of me in that, probably.
