SPOILER ALERT: The story includes details about Episode 108 of ABC’s Scrubs, “My Odds.”
A Scrubs fan favorite, Dr. Cox (John McGinley), made his long-awaited return tonight. It marked McGinley’s first episode of the revival since Dr. Cox announced his retirement in the premiere, appointing J.D. (Zach Braff) as new Chief of Medicine.
Dr. Cox did not come back to Sacred Heart to check in on his successor. By the end of the episode, written by the revival’s showrunner Aseem Batra, he was a patient at the hospital, diagnosed with microscopic polyangiitis, an incurable autoimmune disease.
The revelation triggered an emotional response from the typically cynical Dr. Cox who made amends with Elliot (Sarah Chalke) and had a heart-to-heart with J.D., reluctantly agreeing for his former pupil to be his doctor.
In an interview with Deadline from his rehearsal space in Malibu, McGinley spoke about the shocking development and his dramatic turn in the episode, drawing parallels to Dr. Cox’s Season 3 arc, in which he was coping with the death of his best friend, played by Brendan Fraser, his experience filming Oliver Stone’s Best Picture Oscar-winning film Platoon, and dealing with the death of his own father in real life.
McGinley also teased the upcoming return of another Scrubs original cast member, Christa Miller, reprising her role as Cox’s ex Jordan, in the Season 1 finale airing next week.
He also hinted that the diagnosis is far from a death sentence, and that Cox would be back by popular demand in a larger capacity than the three episodes he appeared in this season should Scrubs get renewed, something fully expected given the revival’s strong performance on both linear and streaming. He explained why the show needs more of his caustic character.
DEADLINE: What was your reaction to the storyline when you were first told, did you know what microscopic polyangiitis is?
MCGINLEY: The technical advisor now is a woman named Yarrow [Reid], she is an emergency doctor up in Vancouver. Zach’s character is named after a guy named John Doris, aka J.D.. Well, that was a real guy who went to school with [Scrubs creator] Bill Lawrence, he and his wife Molly were our technical advisors at the time. You could go to them, and with all great teachers, you can’t ask a stupid question. That liberates those of us who are intimidated by people giving us judgment, and Yarrow is cut from that cloth.
So no, I don’t know anything, all I know about is Down Syndrome and being a caregiver in the special needs community, I don’t know anything else. [McGinley has a son with Down Syndrome and is known for his advocacy work.] So when this stuff is presented to me, I go to the technical advisor, and I say, make this accessible to me. And Yarrow broke that down for me through repeated Zooms, so before I went up to Vancouver, I had a civilian enough understanding of what this malady, what this challenge was, to be able to play the scene.
DEADLINE: In our interview about the premiere, you said that Dr. Cox would be coming back to the hospital “in a profoundly different capacity.” I asked you if you’re going to be a patient and if Cox is dying, to which you replied, ‘We all die, Nellie.” In light of what we saw in Episode 8, was that just a quip, or was that you foreshadowing what was to come?
MCGINLEY: That was a quip because I was told to stay in my lane as far as not doing any spoilers, and because I’m so fond of you and read you all the time. I just wanted to have some fun with you.
DEADLINE: Still, Dr. Cox is pretty pessimistic in this episode. As J.D. noted, while not curable, this is a manageable disease, it can go into remission. Why do you think Cox saw it so darkly, saying that ‘I’m in early stages of renal failure’?
MCGINLEY: I think some people are prone to being fatalists, and when you’ve been inundated and oversaturated with all these challenges and maladies that have gotten on you for the better part of 30+ years, and you try that on, I think that can be a heavy burden and a fragile bargain, and that’s scary.
What’s lovely about this episode, and the reason I wanted to talk to you about it, is that it’s really amazing to be able to excavate some of Cox’s fear. Aside from the Brendan Fraser episode, we don’t get to see Cox scared that much because he wears kind of a lead vest to protect himself from others seeing that.
But every once in a blue moon, he opens up and that sternum cracks, and we see that heart beating underneath. That’s what happens in 108 and the actor got to dive into that; it was on the page, and it was so delicious. And we really took our time with that scene with Sarah where he reconciles what could have been some catastrophic teaching mistakes he made.
And the scene with Zachy in the third act when I say, ‘Yeah, I want you to be my doctor, I was trying to protect you from this but yes, you’re what I wrought. Now it’s time. And I got very upset between ‘action’ and ‘cut’, organically as the character. It didn’t catch me off guard, but it felt like, okay, I must have been carrying this stuff for a long time.
DEADLINE: How was it filming those scenes? This is the most dramatic I have seen you in a long time. Did you tear up and get emotional?
MCGINLEY: Yeah, I was a mess. And that’s not the stuff you cut in, because sometimes when the actors get too upset, it deprives the audience of sharing in that arc. What’s in the episode is the stuff that still makes it accessible for the audience. I remember the end of Platoon, when I take that body off me, and I’m coming out of the foxhole and the guy who’s on mop-up duty for the post combat area, I was a mess.
And Oliver kept the one in where I get through the line, and I’m not a mess, because actors sometimes just let it go, man, we can’t help it. We’ve been carrying this Sisyphean bargain with us. Sometimes you just want to put it down, and with that comes a release. But sometimes the lens suffers that as your indulgence, not ours, not the viewers. So there has to be a real deft touch in post, in edit. And I think Billy did a great job with letting the audience own that, not Cox.
DEADLINE: You mentioned the scene with Sarah Chalke. It seemed like you got goodbyes with the main cast as Dr. Cox admitted his mistakes and reconciled; it almost felt like a farewell episode. Am I reading too much into this or is it, as you said, Cox being fatalist?
MCGINLEY: I think it reminded me a couple of times of when my father was in hospice 10 or plus years ago. Dad was a big, strong Irish guy, and he wouldn’t let go. And the hospice worker said no further than here, she goes, you have to go in there, and you have to tell your father it’s okay to leave.
I didn’t know what to say other than Okay, I will, because he wasn’t letting go. And I carried some of that into this with me, because if we do have an opportunity to reconcile relationships — which some of your friends and mine don’t if they’re just taken out — then I think you have an obligation to try and articulately reconcile something if you’re given the opportunity.
I think Cox is given the opportunity to reconcile some things that could have gone really sideways that didn’t, and the one being with Sarah. She could have stopped, she could have gone like F this, I’m not doing this, this guy’s too heavy, this Dr. Cox, and this is not what I signed up for. And I think for Cox to reconcile that and share it with her is the stuff you dream of getting to play as an actor when it’s on the page like that.
DEADLINE: There is a line in the episode where Cox says to J.D.: ‘Will you promise me that you’ll keep me alive for a very long time? Because I don’t want my death to be the thing that makes you cynical, because I won’t be around here to enjoy it. Even in death, I couldn’t bear the irony.’ It really stood out to me, it made me cry and laugh at the same time.
MCGINLEY: Me too. Billy didn’t write that. Aseem wrote that, and when I saw it, like you, there were so many nuances in that turn because Zach won’t let me finish. And I tell him, ‘I’m not done.’ I think he’s being impacted by the compliment. And I’m like, Don’t interrupt me, because I’m about to lower the hammer.
I’m in the rehearsal space now, I don’t know if you can see this but I paint my lines, that’s what I do, I paint them on this paper and and I put them around the house. I wrestled with that one for a long time, because you put your finger on it, there’s this really double-edged nuance in there.
Cox always has to be speaking at a Martin Scorsese clip, things go fast with Cox. I didn’t want to indulge that line and put it up on a billboard, but I did want to let you know that it was a really special sentiment. And so your ear is quite acute, that one impacted me in a similar way.
DEADLINE: What has Cox been up to since he retired? It wasn’t addressed on the show. What has he been doing, playing golf maybe?
MCGINLEY: I don’t know if hobbies would be Cox’s best friends. I remember talking to the shrink, John McGinley talking to the shrink about two or three years ago. I was micromanaging people here in the house too much, and I told him that. He goes, ‘Look, what do you feel like your No. 1 objective as a father and a husband has been for the last 28 years.’ And I go, ‘I know what it’s been.’ He goes, ‘what? Why do you have such clarity?’ And I go, ‘I’m the provider, that’s my job around here, I provide. [McGinley’s wife] Nicole [Kessler] keeps everybody safe, and I provide.’
He goes, ‘Well, you’ve done that, you’ve checked that off. Now you, John McGinley, have to find some other things to do, because you’ve already provided, you’ve done that. People don’t want you to micromanage them, they’re all having their lives, and you put them in position to flourish.’ And he goes, ‘You have to now find things that make you happy, not in a self indulgent way, but the bad version of it is whether you’re going to ride a bicycle or go on hikes or start painting.’ He goes, ‘there’s no wrong answer, but you now have to inventory some different things that make you happy.’
And so since I’ve always found like Cox is one or two silos removed from me, I figured that’s what he was doing too. I figured he was checking off in a complete failure way, checking off things that make him happy. And I profoundly doubt that he’s found anything yet that fills that cup.
DEADLINE: We know that Christa Miller is coming back. She hasn’t been on yet, so it will be in the upcoming finale. What can you tell us about Cox’s reunion with Jordan and what’s coming up with his diagnosis in the finale?
MCGINLEY: Look, when Christa wants to, she can fit into the same lane as Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday with Cary Grant. She can play screwball as well as any of those actors in the 30s, like Barbara Stanwyck. She’s so daft, and she’s so nimble in that space that when I’m in the frame with her, I know that the rhythms she can serve in Bill’s scripts are so keen, and she’s so agile that that’s what we do in the ninth episode. We get back to that almost volleys at the net of a ping-pong game, it’s rat-a-tat-tat. It’s Preston Sturges time, it’s Rosalind Russell time.
She can do that, and hardly anybody can. And her rhythms and my rhythms, when we fit into that space, are thrilling. That’s as thrilling as it gets for me in the frame. And so when she comes back, we get to indulge and explore this screwball rhythm from the 30s and 40s. And that’s what we do in the ninth episode.
We were leaving the set buzzing off it up in Vancouver after episode 109, we were writing each other these appreciation texts of how fun that was to be in the frame with you and playing that scene. And they’re only a page and a half, and they’re rat-a-tat-tat-tat, and they’re done. They’re a lot of flavor, there’s not much expository stuff in it.
But in 109, Zach and I conspire to not tell Jordan what’s going on. And because Christa is so bright, tone-wise and intellectually, the camera doesn’t suffer her not knowing what’s going on, that feels preposterous. And of course it is. There’s accountability, and in screwball, that’s when the protagonist becomes the female, and Zach and I are left in her wake, and it’s fantastic.
DEADLINE: What about Season 2? The show hasn’t been renewed yet but it will be.
MCGINLEY: I think that Cox will come back a lot more in Season 2. There’s been a big outcry, that’s very flattering. But I also think structurally, I was sharing this with a friend of mine the other day. I don’t know if you remember Joe Campbell and his exploration of myth and the structure of myth.
I think Zach’s character as the hero in this three-act tale, as it pertains to Joe Campbell, the hero needs consequences and a threat and jeopardy, and without Ken Jenkins and not enough the Janitor, it falls on; the threat would be failure with the interns this season, and that’s great. But he needs a threat, he needs consequence. There has to be jeopardy, and that jeopardy is Cox, however Billy writes it. I think Cox will be more thickly woven into the tapestry of Season 2. I’m completely speculating.
DEADLINE: We don’t have time to talk about your new Bill Lawrence comedy series Rooster for HBO. Congratulations of its early ratings success. You look amazing in it as the college president though I wouldn’t mind it if we see less of him in the hot house.
MCGINLEY: I lost 40 pounds for that, Nellie! A sixty-seven-year old man. But I get it.
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They’ve done an outstanding job with this revival. Strong writing and a good supporting new cast! Feels like the original series
nice article – I understand the reasons why they werent in it as much, but having so little of McGinley and Reyes in this season has been its main detractor – along with the three stars, theyre equally as integral to what made Scrubs work. (Itd be great if the whole cast could be there, but you can only work within a realistic structure, the new characters are important and you cant fit everybody in)