John C. McGinley makes quite the splash early in the premiere of the new HBO comedy series Rooster.
Series star Steve Carell plays Greg Russo, an author visiting the campus of Ludlow College, a New England institution of higher learning. His daughter Katie Russo, played by English actor Charly Clive, is a professor at the college. Still, he’s a bit nervous to address students. He’s written 11 bestsellers, but he never attended college. His novels, centering on a protagonist named Rooster, are considered “beach reads”—not exactly the stuff of traditional college lit classes.
However, Greg’s anxieties are momentarily redirected when he sees a man in his 60s, shirtless and wet, walking across the campus. Their eyes meet and the man points at him, then balls his hand into a fist to punch the air. Greg is so rattled by the man that he collides with his student guide.
That shirtless man is McGinley, an actor from New Jersey known for his ability to deploy a certain strain of gravitas in grand comedic fashion, shirt or no. He plays Walter Mann, the bold and unflinching president of Ludlow College, who likes to quote Theodore Roosevelt and “throw some metal around” at the campus gym. While he does wear shirts, ties and suspenders, he is also frequently in a state of undress.
McGinley and Steve Carell in “Rooster.” Photo: Katrina Marcinowski/HBO
McGinley, who grew up in Short Hills and Millburn, commands attention with unforgettable characters in positions of authority, like Perry Cox in Scrubs. The hilariously abrasive chief of medicine at Sacred Heart Hospital just returned to tangle with fellow Jersey guy Zach Braff’s John “J.D.” Dorian in the ABC series revival. McGinley has always made the character his own.
But Walt hits a little closer to the genuine article.
“This wasn’t based on me,” McGinley tells New Jersey Monthly. “It is me.”
Bill Lawrence, the creator of Scrubs, teamed with former series writer and producer Matt Tarses for Rooster—a show about grief, storytelling, love, heartbreak and friendship. The series, premiering Sunday, March 8, unfolds through the lives of Greg Russo and his daughter Katie, an art history professor, along with other faculty, administrators and students on the Ludlow campus.
Between the two Lawrence shows, McGinley is particularly well represented at the moment across cable, streaming and network TV. The beginnings of the Walt character bubbled up when Lawrence, who has known McGinley for decades, rented a summer home two houses down from the actor in Southern California. McGinley introduced Lawrence—who is also behind Apple TV series Ted Lasso, Shrinking and Bad Monkey—to what he calls the “hot-cold protocol.” The practice involves regular sessions in a hothouse sauna directly followed by a cold plunge.
After Walt officially meets Greg in Rooster, he is somehow shirtless again. He proceeds to explain the hot-cold regimen to him: “Hot sauna, cold plunge, every goddamn day. You get the same endorphins you get from cocaine, only it lasts two hours instead of nine minutes. Plus, it releases the brown fat.” (The first episode of the show is titled “Release the Brown Fat.”)
Despite all the sauna time, McGinley, 66, remembers feeling slightly on edge when Lawrence shared his plan to create the character.
“We had a great summer together, and then two months later, around about October, he asked if he could come out and talk to me about something,” he says. “And I said ‘sure.’ It made me nervous. But he came out to my place, and while we were having a hothouse session, he said ‘I want to steal your life.’ And I didn’t know what that meant at the time. I couldn’t imagine what that meant. It’s the strangest thing anybody’s ever said to me. Of course, it just fills one with fear that someone’s going to steal your life and then let somebody else play it. But that wasn’t the case with Billy, and what he did was he stole my life and he created the character of Walter Mann … The program here was for Walter Mann to play John McGinley, and that’s what Billy put on the page.”
McGinley with Zach Braff on the “Scrubs” revival. Photo: Disney/Darko Sikman
Scrubs favorite Perry Cox, known for delivering delightfully searing insults to Braff’s J.D. character, was based on Lawrence’s father-in-law, “a genius doctor and a larger-than-life character,” McGinley says. Having college president Walt channel McGinley and then having McGinley play him was an “entirely different approach,” the actor says. He’d never had to muster the courage to play himself in this way—albeit under a different name, position and set of circumstances.
Even the college administrator’s fixation on Teddy Roosevelt is all McGinley; in the show, he plays a Roosevelt scholar.
The Plunge, Sports and a Good Old Jersey Deli
McGinley, who moved to Malibu 35 years ago, sports a slimmed-down physique for his semi-clothed appearances in Rooster. It helps to keep up with the hothouse-cold plunge routine, which is attached to a workout.
“I do it every morning,” he says. “There’s a group that comes out … I converted a garage space I have into a gym called the Pipe Factory. And so a couple of pals of mine, as people rotate in and out of being home, we come over and we train for about 45 minutes, and then we go to do the heat and the ice. So that’s at 9 a.m., and then at night, right before dinner, I do two sessions of 15 minutes in the heat and five minutes in the ice. And I do that every day. And so I’m in withdrawal here in New York right now.”
Having moved to California so long ago, McGinley occasionally pines for another, less slimming creature comfort—an old Jersey standby.
“The thing I miss the most is the Millburn Deli and the rye bread,” he says. “It’s perfect to my taste because I grew up on it, and so to me, it’s what rye bread’s supposed to taste like.”
As for his own education, McGinley, who was born in New York, pursued acting as a student at Syracuse University and New York University. His film credits include roles in the Oliver Stone movies Platoon, Wall Street, Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July, Nixon and Any Given Sunday. He’s an alum of Millburn High School (Class of 1978), where he played football and wasn’t one of the theater kids.
“I was a jock,” McGinley says. “There were a couple of different cliques in my high school. There was the stoners, there was the jocks, there was the theater club. I was a jock, and I don’t know how young men make it through high school without being in some kind of athletic program, because what happens with coaches is they have consequences that they can level on young men for being late or for getting in detention. You have to run the stadium steps for an hour. Well, your parents aren’t gonna make you do that.”
McGinley revives his role of Perry Cox on “Scrubs.” Photo: Disney/Brian Bowen Smith
“And so my experience in high school was being an athlete, 24/7, and it kept me on the straight and narrow. I was too tired to get in trouble. I was class clown. I had a girlfriend at the time, and I wanted to do athletics and be with my girlfriend, and there was no time for anything else. And whenever I started to dabble in nonsense, the consequence was coaches. Where your parents could just yell at you, coaches could make you do 5,000 sit-ups or something impossible, and so you get in line. And in retrospect, it was a gift to be a jock.”
The Warmth of Bill Lawrence and Return of Scrubs
Having worked with Bill Lawrence for so long, McGinley knows his talent for making shows that have a warm, lived-in feel. Think Shrinking, Ted Lasso and Scrubs.
“I think one of Billy’s great strengths is writing from familiarity,” McGinley says, pointing to Lawrence’s ties to academia. His great-great grandfather, William Van Duzer Lawrence, founded Sarah Lawrence College, originally a women’s college, in 1926. The Yonkers school, which opened on his estate, was named for Bill Lawrence’s great-great grandmother Sarah Bates Lawrence.
“Billy has served on that board for probably a decade, at least,” McGinley says. “He knows academia, and so he can write academia, and he also knows that the overriding exploration in the story is a father-daughter relationship.”
Lawrence shares daughter Charlotte Lawrence, a 25-year-old singer who released her debut album in 2025, with wife Christa Miller, an actor known for her roles in Shrinking and Scrubs. Miller is a music supervisor on Rooster, which boasts a bittersweet Michael Stipe theme song.
“Bill is exploring the fragility of father-daughter relationships, again, from familiarity,” McGinley says. “When you feel like there’s ‘home’ there, Billy is at home there and he puts it on the page, and so it’s not a leap for the people consuming it to feel familiar there.”
“Scrubs” and “Rooster” creator Bill Lawrence with “Scrubs” cast members Donald Faison, Sarah Chalke, Zach Braff, Judy Reyes and John C. McGinley Photo: John Fleenor/ABC
As for the supporting cast, actor-comedian Robby Hoffman (Hacks) is a standout.
Braff, a former South Orange and Maplewood resident, directed the third and fourth episodes of Rooster, which filmed at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. He also helmed the series premiere of the Scrubs revival, which filmed in Vancouver and aired February 25.
“Zachy’s sets run like clockwork because he’s such a gifted actor,” McGinley says. “He can talk the language that other actors can assimilate and put into action.”
It helped that returning to the acerbic Perry Cox was no big ordeal.
“Being on Scrubs again was like riding a bike,” McGinley says. “We did almost 200 episodes. And so it begs the question, if that wasn’t immediately accessible to you, what were you doing the whole time? It was not like wringing water out of a rock. And Billy wrote the pilot. And so the syncopation and Cox’s rhythms, which are tantamount to Marty Scorsese’s rhythms, were right there on the page, and you can fall right into it. And it was delightful to be up in Vancouver, which is one of my favorite cities on the planet.”
Rooster premieres Sunday, March 8 on HBO at 10 pm, and will be streaming on HBO Max. Scrubs airs Wednesdays on ABC at 8 pm and streams the next day on Hulu.
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