John C. McGinley Says Bill Lawrence Asked to ‘Steal His Life’ and Love of Saunas for ‘Rooster’

When “Rooster” creator Bill Lawrence first approached longtime collaborator John C. McGinley about his HBO comedy show led by Steve Carell, he asked if he could steal McGinley’s life — or at least his passion for saunas and cold plunges.

“Bill was in my hot house in Southern California after spending a summer together when he rented a house two doors down and a couple of months later, he came out to my abode, and we had a session in the hot house, and he asked me if he could steal my life, and I had no idea what he was talking about,” McGinley told TheWrap. “What he was talking about was creating a character not based on me, but me in a Steve Carell comedy.”

McGinley agreed to Lawrence’s ask, though it was McGinley’s ritual of the sauna and cold plunge — which McGinley said he does “every day, twice a day” — that made it into the show through his character, Walter, the dean at the college Carell’s Greg Russo finds himself at while checking in on his daughter, Katie (Charly Clive).

While McGinley noted the ask was “flattering,” he admitted the task of playing a character based on his own personal characteristics was “quite daunting.”

“I’ve never played myself before,” McGinley said. “I’ve always leaned into the foibles and eccentricities of a character that you can hide behind a little bit to tell you the truth and so, to have Walt play John C. McGinley was a whole different path.”

McGinley wasn’t too surprised that Lawrence pulled from real life, explaining that the “Scrubs” creator “writes from familiarity.”

“If the central exploration of this show is a father-daughter relationship, Bill writes from his relationship with his daughter, Charlotte Lawrence, who’s a genius singer and touring over in Europe right now, and Bill writes about the fragility of that relationship and how ephemeral that is,” McGinley said, adding that he also resonates with the through line as the father to two daughters.

“For Bill to have been with me for two or three months in the middle of the summer, and for me to take him through the hot-cold protocol, he put that in the script because it was familiar,” McGinley continued. “It’s where we reconnected after Bill had been busy with something and I had been busy with stuff, and … I’ll be god damned that they didn’t put that on the page.”

After collaborating with Lawrence on four projects, including “Rooster,” the “Scrubs” reboot on ABC, the original “Scrubs” and “Ground Floor,” which was created by Lawrence and Greg Malins, McGinley calls working with Lawrence “a gift,” naming him as the “Norman Lear of his generation” and placing him and Shonda Rhimes as the most prolific voices of their generation.

“To be with that guy is the biggest gift an actor could possibly ask for, but it would be dysfunctional to ask for it because it’s not going to happen, so how I dumbed into that is the stuff that dreams are made of,” McGinley said.

McGinley also applauded the cast of “Rooster” as a “murderer’s row” and a “bunch of Hall of Famers,” specifically calling out Danielle Deadwyler as “arguably one of the best actors on the planet,” as well as Clive as the “Debra Winger of her generation.”

New episodes of “Rooster” arrive Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.

The post John C. McGinley Says Bill Lawrence Asked to ‘Steal His Life’ and Love of Saunas for ‘Rooster’ appeared first on TheWrap.