Zach Braff & Donald Faison Revisit Scrubs On 'Fake Doctors, Real Friends'

Scrubs co-stars and real-life best friends Zach Braff and Donald Faison host Fake Doctors, Real Friends, reliving episodes of Scrubs, giving us behind-the-scenes memories, and hosting interviews with beloved cast members and Scrubs superfans. On this episode, they talk about the second-ever episode of the series and share some hilarious stories of a party in 2001 where Donald got so drunk that he gave a noogie to the president of NBC, Jeff Zucker (now the head of CNN). He’s “got him in a full headlock...and I hear Jeff Zucker go, ‘Please, Donald, no!’” Zach recalls. “He did stay away from me for a long time” after that, Donald recalls. “He was very, very afraid of me.” They also get into the one celebrity Zach couldn’t help but gush over, how Zach helped Donald meet his now-wife CaCee Cobb, why Disney felt the need for the taxidermied dog Rowdy to have a bodyguard, and much more.

They both praise the handling of the first few episodes in establishing the tone and style of the series, especially the most important theme, “where we young doctors are learning the importance of nurses,” Zach says. With the coronavirus sweeping the globe, the incredibly important and difficult work nurses do is at the forefront of his mind, he says, and Donald agrees: “Nurses are the heart and soul of the hospital.” Similarly, this episode focuses on Zach’s character, J.D., learning to let go of taking everyone’s health too personally as he tries to get a patient to quit smoking. “How do you develop the strength to get up again if you’re so invested in this person’s wellbeing?” Donald says. “As much as it sucks to hear, that’s how doctors have to be, that’s how nurses have to be...how do you put up a shield so when you lose someone, you can still come back the next day and do your job?” 

They laugh about Rowdy, the taxidermied dog, which was a bit Zach created because a doctor told him he never had time to have a pet, so he thought it would be funny if they had a stuffed pet they treated as if it were real. It was the only prop Zach wanted to keep when the show ended, but Disney, who owns the show, refused. “I pictured Rowdy going into an endless, infinite warehouse…of taxidermied dogs,” Zach says, like the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Later, when Zach requested to borrow Rowdy as an Easter egg for a scene, they sent “an actual bodyguard” for the dog because they thought he might steal it from them. (To be fair, Donald points out, he probably would have.) Listen to the episode to hear more behind-the-scenes tidbits about the cast, the many people Zach’s been told he looks like, all their favorite Taylor Swift songs, and plenty more Scrubs goodness on Fake Doctors, Real Friends.

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