Sarah Chalke tells TV Week about returning to Sacred Heart, 15 years later, in the Vancouver-filmed revival of Scrubs
Sarah Chalke could not be more thrilled to clock back in at Sacred Heart Hospital. A decade-and-a-half after saying goodbye to Scrubs, Elliot (Chalke), J.D. (Zach Braff) and Turk (Donald Faison) are once again reunited as colleagues, with series creator Bill Lawrence back at the helm. “Oh, we’re so happy,” says the B.C.-raised Chalke. “We’re so excited. It’s been really, really, really, truly even funner than I had anticipated.”
Before viewers get too excited about the resurrection of “Eagle!” or the recurring abuse of J.D. by Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley), there are some things that have evolved in the 15 years that have passed. “The difference now is that, obviously, [back then] they were brand-new and that was part of the fun. They were fish out of water. They were trying everything for the first time. They were insecure about their knowledge, their skills, all of those things,” says Chalke. “In this iteration, [they’re] coming back and being teachers and leaders. For Elliot, I think she really cares and wants to teach these new interns.”
Then there are the off-the-clock changes. Remember that Elliot-J.D. wedding we heard about in season nine? The marriage, unfortunately, didn’t last. Chalke isn’t losing sleep over it — in fact. she thinks it’s for the best. “I loved where Bill and the team landed, because I feel like if J.D. and Elliot were happily married now, there’s not a lot of drama and comedy if everybody is fine,” the actress muses. “I feel like having them divorced as an entry point gives so much room for them to figure out in this new version — who they’re going to be to each other, how they’re going to co-parent, and how they’re actually going to end up working together again and finding a way back to a friendship.”
But in some ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Just like Lawrence and his writers incorporated aspects of the actors into the original series, some real-life “Chalkey” quickly slipped into the reboot. “The original idea of Elliot, she was kind of a b**** and that quickly shifted. They were like, ‘OK, Sarah — total klutz — let’s write that in.’ You would think that part would be different in this iteration 25 years later, but actually it’s not,” Chalke chuckles. “Two days before shooting, we had a rehearsal and met all of the new young interns, and Zach said, ‘You guys, Chalkey’s gonna break something every day.’ And the next day, I was hiking with the dogs and I fell and broke my finger. So, not a lot has changed.”
While Chalke and her old castmates slipped right back into the groove, the challenge for the writers was finding the right tone. “I think we really wanted to get back to the first season of Scrubs that was much more grounded,” says Chalke. “[In the interest of] grounding it, we would try it a bunch of different ways and do different takes and kind of find those levels.” Luckily, mixing laughter with tragedy also happens to be what the Ted Lasso and Shrinking creator excels at. “It was absolutely my favourite part about Scrubs — that ‘Bill Lawrence Special’ of having comedy and pathos, when you’re laughing one minute and then it’s a gut-punch the next,” says Chalke. “What set Scrubs, and the tone of it, really early on was the third episode we did called ‘My Old Lady’ where it says, ‘One out of every three patients admitted here will die here,’ and all three [doctors] wonder the whole time in the split-screen, is it going to be J.D., Elliot or Turk who lose their patient — and then it’s all three. That combination of comedy and the drama, it’s my favourite kind of television to watch, but also to act in, because no day was ever boring, no two days were ever the same.”
The decade-and-a-half time jump, says Chalke, allowed for creative freedom in terms of where life had taken these doctors. “Everybody as human beings have had so much more life experience, and I think for Donald, Zach and I to be playing the teachers this round has been really fun.” The actress also praises Lawrence’s ability to inject optimism in all his projects. “When Bill writes his shows — and I think it’s why Ted Lasso worked so well during the pandemic and what I also feel about Shrinking — is they all have an element of hope,” she says. “It’s what I loved in the original Scrubs. They’re always hopeful — and I think that is another thing we really wanted to capture in this round.”
Lest this start to sound like an obituary for their executive producer, Lawrence is very much alive and prolific — he just remained in Los Angeles, while the rest of the crew decamped to Vancouver, where the revival was shot. “We had Bill there every day on the original one and now we don’t,” Chalke laments. “We shot at this old, abandoned hospital in the Valley in Los Angeles, and the writers’ room was in one of the wings, so they would just radio down and [Bill] would run up for rehearsal and he’d be like, ‘Oh, try this line instead. Here’s an alt joke.’ I learned everything about comedy and timing and how to tell a joke on the job, from Bill.”
That said, the Vancouver native can’t help but feel like she manifested this dream gig. “I had said, two years prior, ‘I just want to do a comedy like Scrubs, that felt like Scrubs, shooting in Vancouver.’ And then that’s what ended up happening!” she marvels. “It was neat that it was in my hometown and that I got to have everyone come to my city. It was really cool. And to share it with my kids . . . when I did Firefly Lane there, it was COVID and they couldn’t really come visit. To get to share that with them and with my nieces and nephew, it was a really, really special part of it.”
Scrubs airs Wednesdays on CTV and ABC