Inside The Rebuilt Scrubs Hospital With Zach Braff, Donald Faison, and Sarah Chalke

Oh, hey, AD, how are you?

I'm Zach Braff, welcome to our fake hospital.

[bright upbeat music]

[gentle guitar music]

The thing that was crazy about this project,

was fully recreating an actual hospital

where we shot the original Scrubs show.

And we would shoot on the first floor, the second floor,

and the fourth floor.

And all the dressing rooms and offices and everything

was on the third floor.

So, what you're seeing first here,

is a recreation of the outside here in Vancouver.

And this is exactly 100% accurate

what the outside of Scrubs look like.

Except, of course, if you tilts up,

this is just a warehouse.

Now if you do a transition here,

you'll be able to see what it looks like in post

when we do what's called a set extension

and we recreate the full four-story hospital.

The magic of filmmaking.

Let's go inside and I'll show you around.

[bright energetic music]

So, one of the amazing things,

is that we were able to recreate the full scale

of all major playing spaces from the original Scrubs show.

This is the entrance, and this is the only section

we couldn't fully connect to everything

because of just the layout of this warehouse.

But I wanna show you something really cool

that our brilliant production designer Roger came up with.

This is an optical illusion.

If you look down, that is not just your average scenic drop.

Just keep getting closer, keep going, keep going,

go to the side,

and you'll see that it's fully three dimensional.

It's really trippy, this is all Roger's brilliance.

[bright music]

A long time ago, I saw this painting

made by this artist called Patrick Hughes.

Kind of the same principle as The Haunted Mansion.

And at this day,

when you see the concave busts following your eye line,

what about we make a photo of the hallway

with this reverse perspective

that creates illusion in the parallax of the movement?

So, I contact the artist, and he was really helpful.

It's like, I'm happy that you call me.

Everyone steal my idea, but you call.

I'm so happy that you call, you can do whatever you want.

If you need my help, I'm gonna be happy to help you.

When we go shoot there, you see everyone standing

and like swinging to see the effect of the hallway.

The result is quite incredible.

[bright music]

You'll notice there's a little bit of hazing here,

that's 'cause we were doing a bar scene with lots of smokes.

You'll hear me say this probably a couple times.

I always thought we were gonna recreate this,

like maybe 65% to scale, 75% to scale.

This is a 100% accurate recreation of the hospital cafeteria

where so many good scenes have gone down.

You should try trading places with me for one day.

It's actually not that bad.

And the lace feels soft against my package.

I mean, I spent nine years of my life in this exact space

when it was on Riverside in Whitsett

in the valley of Los Angeles.

So, it's just very surreal.

I mean, we spent so much time here.

When I knew we were gonna do a revival,

I never thought, in 1,000 years,

it would be on a set that was this enormous.

I mean, I think there's 30,000 square feet of hospital.

It's pretty F-ing insane.

What the hell, man?

You're now with the tard?

I knew with you'd be therapy, I didn't want to go deep.

The tard really likes to go deep.

With consent, five.

[bright music]

The main thoroughfare of the OG Scrubs hospital,

and you're gonna come around the bend here into admissions.

In all these years,

wouldn't they have maybe updated their mural?

But for the fans,

we wanted all these little Easter-egg things to be the same,

you know, things like the neon pharmacy sign.

Even if you come around 180

and see the flowers neon of the gift shop.

There was a whole thing about the gift shop girl

and J.D. having a relationship with her.

All of this has just been meticulously recreated.

It's really very surreal.

We were so lucky back in the day

because we could go anywhere in the hospital.

And it was a real luxury.

Because on a normal half-hour comedy,

you've been constrained to a certain amount of sets.

Well, they tore that building down.

So, when we decided to bring the show back to Sacred Heart,

we had a conundrum to solve, how are we gonna do it?

[Roger] One of the benefits of actually building a set,

we can fix all the problems

that you have on a practical location,

which is wild walls, shoot abilities, lighting.

Like a good example that in the admissions.

Then the original was carpet and terracotta tiles,

which for any dolly shot was a mayhem for them.

And what we did, was kind of level everything.

We shouldn't be mopping in here anyway, this is a rug.

[water splashing]

With the gift shop, there was another set

that it was never shot properly in the original one

because it was too small.

There was no angles, there's no walls

that could be turned out to do like a wild camera port.

We planned the gift shop to be like a friendly environment

that we can shoot and have scenes and beats

and wild walls and flooring,

and lighting was a benefit that we took to the maximum here.

[bright upbeat music]

Okay, here we're going into Turk's World.

This is the surgical hallway.

Fans will remember so many scenes that took place in here.

Just take the last word he says, and add a five to it.

I don't know, it just all seems a little unfair.

Unfair five.

Thanks, man, you always know the right things to say.

I work hard on those.

This is a funny, interesting thing

for those of you film geeks.

These window is all gimbal

because when you're shooting glass,

there's so many reflections.

There you go, there's your film trick of the day.

Back when we were making Scrubs,

the American Medical Association said,

believe it or not, even though Scrubs was a comedy,

it was the most accurate in terms of the experience

for doctors and nurses in a hospital.

The pit has taken that mantle these days, obviously,

they really cherish being super accurate.

And we really wanted to at least be tied with the pit,

with our accuracy.

You know, there's multiple medical professionals on set

that are always telling us exactly how everything should be.

Great pains we're taking to get everything perfect.

To get a load of this motley crew.

[gentle music]

No, no, no, sorry.

One of the things I really want to do here,

is that specific smell of the hospital.

And I wanna surprise Zach.

And I told him that I had bought this scent

that we actually can spray

and then it smells like a hospital.

And then Zack was like, hell no,

I don't wanna smell a hospital here.

I was like, oh, I should have surprised them then.

[energetic music]

When we made the original Scrubs, the bar was very small

because it was, [phone ringing]

see there's the bell, they're shooting something.

The bar was wedged into what was the old urgent care

at the hospital.

So, we wanted to make a new bar

with a little more space in it.

And Roger came up with this beautiful bar

with a railroad theme.

We wanted to do a tribute to Sam Lloyd who played Ted,

the lawyer who has passed away.

And so, Roger came up with the idea

to name this Lloyd's Junction.

So, the whole bar is named after Sam Lloyd,

so he'll always be here with us.

Who's the man?

Is it me?

Damn right it's you.

Oh.

I'm obsessed with my foster dog named Penny.

He did a Alexa something for me

and made Penny one of the taps.

So, if you ever come to Lloyd's Junction,

request the Penny beer.

One thing about the original Scrubs,

is that every set was built into this old hospital.

So, not just the hospital sets,

but like Turk and J.D.'s apartment, the bar,

Dr. Cox's apartment was in the basement.

If you look at Dr. Cox's apartment in the show,

it has no windows, really.

Maybe there's some frosted glass,

that's because it was like next door to the morgue

[chuckles] in the hospital.

So, we had to come up with some really interesting choices

to squeeze everything in there.

Can I count on you to never drop by here ever again

or should I just go ahead and move?

Oh, you can't leave a place with this much warmth.

[bright gentle music]

The second you walk in here, you're hot.

This is the ICU of Sacred Heart.

The ICU is a great set for Scrubs the show

because so many different doctors,

whether they be surgical or medical,

can sort of convene around this nurse's station.

All rolling? Yeah.

We have to be quiet now.

Or we'll get yelled at.

People wanna know what it's like to be on a film set.

It's mostly just standing here in silence like this.

It's not very exciting.

Donald will fuck up his lines really quick,

and they'll have to cut and I'll be able

to talk regularly again. Cutting.

Oh yeah, I told you.

So, this is the six-bed area.

Again, so many classic scrub scenes take place

in this very area right here.

The title sequence of Scrubs,

it's called motion control shots.

Every single character does the same exact movement

and the cameras are controlled by a computer,

so it does the exact same shot every single time.

And we just recreated it for the new season.

But we walk here, and then we stop.

And then someone else comes here,

and they put their stethoscope on.

And then someone else gets handed an iPad,

and they walk over to here.

And they throw the image of an X-ray

up on a computer monitor.

Now, a funny little tidbit for you guys,

back in the old days, it was actually a physical X-ray,

we put on a light box.

And somehow, the chest x-ray went up backwards.

And we tried to rationalize it by saying,

well, they're interns, they don't know any better.

There was a lot of questioning.

Should we still have the X-ray be backwards

in the new incarnation?

But we figured, you know what?

It's digital,

and they're very experienced doctors at this point.

It should probably be the right way.

[upbeat music]

Oh my God, Look everyone, it's Donald Faison, the actor.

Donald.

Donald.

Say hi to Architectural Digest.

AD, what is really good?

Welcome, I hope Zach is giving you a great tour.

I did give them a very nice tour.

What did you tour?

I showed them all the sets.

And we had to be quiet while you're rolling,

but I told them, don't worry,

Donald will mess up his lines and they'll have to cut.

Did I? Well, it wasn't too long

that we had to- Did I mess up?

I didn't, you're full of crap, AD,

you can hear it? Hey, don't get mad at AD-

He nodded, and I'm...

Hello AD, welcome to the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit.

I'm Donald Faison, and you're on the set of Scrubs.

Apparently, you've talked to some of our castmates,

like Zach Braff, I heard he had a lot to say.

But did you talk to Sarah Chalke?

Oh, hi, Donald.

You're in the supply closet.

Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out what this does.

I think it's a comb.

No, it's a dingle hopper from The Little Mermaid.

It's a dingle hopper.

It's a Little...

Look at this stuff. A dingle.

Is it- Oh, enough, enough.

The detail on the set. This is crazy.

It's crazy, like I don't know what these things do.

My very first scene, I think, was in the supply closet.

And the pilot of the scene was Zach.

Did you shoot in,

it doesn't look like the old supply closet though.

This is, okay, we've got a couple different supply closet.

Right.

Pass me a check kit.

Thanks.

I got goosebumps the first time I walked on here.

Like I was racing here, it was for wardrobe fitting.

And I hadn't like mentally prepared

that it was going to be identical, the details,

the feeling of it. To scale.

To scale.

'Cause obviously it was like another character in the show,

this abandoned hospital

that had been a functioning hospital for decades.

Okay, this was one of the trippiest sets to walk onto

because it's just so specific.

This, like, the ceiling tiles and the painting.

Like, everything, they've made it completely exact.

My memory of this hallway is-

Surgical, medical,

surgical, yeah. Surgical, yeah.

Surgical, medical. Surgical, medical.

Surgical, yeah. Surgical, yeah.

[bright music]

♪ Surgical, medical, surgical, yeah ♪

♪ Surgical, medical, surgical, yeah ♪

One of the only musicals I've been allowed to be part of

in my whole life-

[Zack] Sarah Chalke is an amazing dancer, you guys.

Oh my god, when I stand here,

[Zack] do you remember Neil from- Oh. [chuckling]

He just went off, and it was like take after take

after take after take.

The writers would start to write his dialogue,

and then they put in brackets or whatever Neil says.

Girl problems?

How'd you know?

You look like you got problems.

Your a girl, hence girl problems.

Watch your nails.

[bright upbeat music]

This is where all of us first, the three of us,

the the trio, this is where we all met.

You, me, and J.D.

In the lounge, Donald was playing Pacman.

This isn't the same lounge as the original pilot either.

This is, so the original pilot,

we shot in the hospital in Burbank, California.

And then we had to move to the new hospitals.

But the Pacman machine is where we met Elliot.

I'm Elliot.

Elliot.

Yeah, don't.

Elliot.

Yeah, don't

See, that was the thing. I think is what I said.

And then if you turn around that way,

over here, is where the now default dance

that the kids call it happened.

I was late for work that day.

I think I was like 30 minutes late.

And the thing was packed with everybody in the room.

And I thought, oh, I'm in deep trouble.

But no, they were here to see the dance.

They had to explain to me what was happening in the scene.

I remember this.

I was like, so why am I dancing?

And they were like, you're dancing

because you're auditioning for this band.

And I was like, all right, well, what's the song?

And hey said, Poison.

So, Bell Biv Devoe, Bobby Brown,

Ralph Tresvant, Johnny Gill,

all of those guys

are the reason why the Poison dance came out that way,

because all I did was bit them.

[gentle guitar music]

I was really lucky to be here

when Zach came to see the set for the first time.

He was just like speechless for three minutes,

looking at us, like, I can't believe that you guys did this.

Every step that you go further and further

into the hospital, he was like, oh my God.

I bumped into Donald,

and he is like, I wanna see the set.

I was like, I walk you.

He was just, like it felt like I've never,

I was here yesterday, I've never left.

And that is one of the biggest compliments

having caused that reaction in the cast.

And everyone that comes here,

is like, oh my God, I'm back home.

If the audience at home have the same reaction,

I think that's successful.

The people that were craving,

the return of Scrubs can see Sacred Heart,

see this environment and be here,

say like, hey, I'm back home.

Hey AD, thank you for stopping by.

We gotta get back to work.

And we're very grateful that you came to visit us.

We're gonna give you a wave goodbye.

Can we get a wave goodbye?

[gentle guitar music continues]