“I read the Scrubs pilot, and I was like… ‘This is really, really, really good. I want this so badly!’ – Sarah Chalke
Before actress Sarah Chalke portrayed Elliot Reid on nine seasons of Scrubs, she was best known for playing the second Becky Conner for two stints on Roseanne in the 1990s. After that series, she returned to work in her native Canada. So while she had already appeared on an American sitcom, she was still relatively unknown as a lead actress. In an interview with Digital Spy, she explains how she at first didn’t take the audition for Scrubs too seriously — until she read the script.
“With the Scrubs pilot, I’d just moved to LA a couple of months before with my best friend. We didn’t know anyone. We never had any plans. We had plans to go to a show, and I got two auditions for the next morning. I’m so Type A, and normally I work on an audition from the second I get it until the second I go in the room. And I was like, ‘I’m not cancelling. I’m not cancelling these plans. Whatever these two auditions are, I’m not cancelling these plans.'”
But as it turns out, when Chalke finally got to the Scrubs script she realized how good of a project it was. She remembers, “I got home at midnight, and I read the Scrubs pilot, and I was like, ‘Oh, s—. This is really, really, really good. I want this so badly!’ And the audition was at 9am. So I thought, ‘OK, I’ll skip the other audition, and I’ll just focus on the Scrubs one’. I went in the next morning at 9, and, yeah, I’ll never forget the moment that Bill [Lawrence, showrunner] called me and was like, ‘You’ve got it’.”
However, it took quite some time until she received that life-changing phone call. Chalke remembers: “It was a bit of a long, drawn-out process. I remember just feeling like, I thought I was maybe dreaming when I got that phone call.”
