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Zach Braff failed his first Scrubs audition – so he auditioned again, knowing the producers wouldn’t remember him
Zach Braff failed his first Scrubs audition, so he tried again hoping the casting agents had forgotten him (they had)
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If at first you don’t succeed, just do it again and pretend the first time didn’t happen.
That’s the advice that landed Zach Braff the lead role on Scrubs. Braff played Dr. John Dorian for 9 seasons on the medical comedy and recently returned to the role for a Hulu revival. JD has been a part of Zach Braff’s life since 2001, and it never would’ve happened if he hadn’t followed his agent’s unconventional advice.
“I auditioned in New York; it wasn’t a good audition,” Zach Braff admitted during a recent THR Comedy Actor Roundtable. “I hadn’t prepared or done the work as we were mentioning. This was back when we were FedExing VHS tapes to LA to be seen. No one saw the tape, it was bad. And weeks later they still hadn’t found the guy, and my agent said, ‘Look, there's so many people. I don’t think they’re going to keep track. Just go in again.’ I was in LA this time, and it was old school pilot season. I mean, there’s mayhem. We were going on five auditions a day back in 2000, and they were like, ‘It’s chaos over there. Just go. Just go in again.’”
And that’s exactly what Braff did, and amazingly, it worked. “I went in again like nothing. Like I had never read for it. The first had been New York with a VHS tape, and this was LA in person, and I was very prepared, and I crushed it. I knew I crushed it because the casting director was like, ‘What are you doing later today?’ Which is the greatest thing you can ever hear. And then rapidly I was sitting with Bill Lawrence, and it was all happening, and it was all because this agent had the audacity to be like, ‘Just go in again.’”
Having seen every episode of Scrubs, this is exactly the kind of thing JD would do. He truly was meant to play the role.
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