The TV show Scrubs was full of memorable characters, but one fan-favorite was John C. McGinley’s Dr. Perry Cox, who delighted in torturing main character J.D. However, McGinley almost didn’t get the role even though the part was written with him in mind.
Scrubs premiered in 2001 and followed the lives of a group of doctors, nurses, patients, and other employees at the fictional Sacred Heart Hospital. The sitcom starred Zach Braff as the main character J.D. Donald Faison was his best friend Turk, and Sarah Chalke was J.D.’s friend and on-off girlfriend.
McGinley, known for playing darkly humorous characters in movies like Wall Street, Point Break, and Platoon, was perfect for Dr. Perry Cox, an attending physician who is constantly irritated by J.D. and the rest of the hospital’s employees.
Why John C. McGinley had to audition five times for the ‘Scrubs’ role that was written for him
The actor was perfect for the role, which is unsurprising, considering it was written for McGinley. In an interview with The A.V. Club, he shared that the pilot script for Scrubs was sent to him, with a note in the margin about the character of Dr. Cox.
“In the margin for Dr. Cox, it said ‘a John McGinley type,’” the actor explained. “So when I went in to audition, I said to Billy Lawrence [Scrubs creator], who’s a dear friend of mine, I said, ‘Well, I’m John McGinley.’”
Hilariously, Lawrence told McGinley, “Because there’s so many ladles in the soup in television, you have to go through an audition process,” which the actor did.
“Disney was the producer, so I had to audition twice at Disney. And NBC was the exhibitor, and so I auditioned twice at NBC. So I auditioned for ‘a John McGinley type’ five times,” McGinley laughed.
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McGinley was one of Scrubs fans’ favorite characters, and the actor received Television Critics Association, Online Film & Television, and Satellite award nominations for his performance on the sitcom.
John C. McGinley calls ‘Scrubs’ nine-season run ‘impossible’
“The show took off,” McGinley said. “They put us on behind Friends, toward the end of Friends’ run. Then they put us on behind Frasier. So we always had this great lead-in. Then we were on our own, and somehow we stuck around for nine years, which is impossible.”
Scrubs was a fan favorite. But McGinley stressed that the future of the show was always up in the air. He even revealed that at the end of Season 8, they “shot a series finale, not a season finale.”
“Then we got brought back for Season 9,” the actor went on. “That was right at the apex of the recession. And all of the sudden, a phone call comes and is like, “We’re going to shoot 14 or 15 more episodes of Scrubs. So you want to do it?” It was like manna from heaven.”
The ninth season of Scrubs saw the characters move to a different hospital and introduced a group of new characters in an effort to revamp the sitcom. ABC canceled Scrubs in 2010.
