At 14, he was acting alongside Gwyneth. At 18, he was in a Woody. And now, after eight years as the star of Scrubs, Zach Braff has written a play. He talks to Laura Barnett about learning to swear like a Brit
About four years ago, Zach Braff faced up to the fact he had developed a fear of flying. Like most nervous flyers, he thought that learning a bit about aviation ? "How the hell a plane flies through the air" ? would help. But, unlike most nervous flyers, Braff ended up learning how to pilot a plane. "I fell in love with it," he says. "I got my licence two years ago. I have a little single-engine four-seater. It's great for those hour-and-a-half hops around LA."
It's an example of the extraordinary can-do spirit that has underpinned Braff's career. Best known for his eight-and-a-half-year turn as the nervy young doctor JD in the brilliant TV hospital comedy Scrubs, for which he was nominated for one Emmy and three Golden Globes, Braff is that rare breed of actor who is also taken seriously behind the camera. He directed several episodes of Scrubs and, in 2004, wrote, directed and starred in his first film, Garden State, a comedy drama about a man returning home to New Jersey after his mother's death. He won a Grammy for the soundtrack and also put together the music for the 2006 pregnancy romcom The Last Kiss, in which he starred.
Now Braff has turned his attention to the theatre, bringing his play, All New People, across the Atlantic in what is a daunting series of firsts: first play he's ever written for the stage; first time he's starred in his own play; first time he's performed on stage in the UK (the play opens in Manchester before transferring to Glasgow and then London for a 10-week run).
Most first-time playwrights would be quaking in their boots, but Braff, when we meet at a London hotel, seems unruffled. "I always dreamed of doing a play in the West End," says the 36-year-old, sipping on a supersized coffee, his puppyish charm undimmed by the fact he only got off a plane from the US (disappointingly, he didn't fly it) a few hours before. "I've been to London a few times ? as a child, as a backpacker, and for my 35th birthday. I said, 'I've got to come and do a play here.' But I never in 1,000 years guessed it would be my own play. It's like I've spoken it into existence."
All New People is a comic four-hander set in a holiday apartment in Long Beach Island, where the miserable Charlie (played by Braff) is marking his 35th birthday by attempting suicide. This is frustrated by the arrival, in quick succession, of a British estate agent, a fireman and a prostitute. It's already had a successful run off-Broadway ? although staging it there was a high-risk strategy for a debut playwright, as Braff acknowledges. "Here was a guy who'd just come off eight and a half years on a TV show," he says, "bringing his first play to New York ? and just plopping it down right in the middle of the theatre district without workshopping it somewhere else first. I had a big bullseye on my forehead."
Some critics took aim and fired. "When the play is not artificial," sneered the New York Times, "it is aimless. Often it is both at once." But the New York Daily News drew a comparison between Braff and one of his heroes, the playwright and screenwriter Neil Simon: All New People, the critic said, was "blacker in tone and with nastier language than Neil Simon ever used".
"To get any sort of comparison was a tremendous compliment," Braff beams. "As a Jewish kid growing up in suburban New Jersey, Simon and Woody Allen were like religious figures to me. I remember as a very young kid, my father throwing an Annie Hall dinner party, where he projected the film on the living room wall. And we went to see the whole [of Simon's] Eugene trilogy. I'm talking about real fans."
Braff originally had himself in mind for the character of Charlie, but was advised, ahead of the New York run, not to take the role. It was the right decision, he says. "Initially, I was like, 'I want to be in it, I wrote it for myself!' But as the writer, you want to sit in the back of the house, look at the proscenium, take it all in, and tweak it on the laptop as you go. Obviously, there'll be some tweaking here, but not nearly as much. So I felt like this time I wanted to give the part a shot."
This "tweaking" appears to be continuing: I'm not allowed to read the play until shortly before we meet, as I'm told Braff is still working on it on the plane. Most of the changes, he says, are to make the script more accessible to British audiences, who might not have understood, say, the gag about Americans sneaking into Canada to buy prescription medicine. "Carey Mulligan did an early reading for me in New York," he says. "There were a couple of places where she said, 'OK, this expression we don't really use, but we would say this.' Words like 'bollocks' ? if you say that to an American audience they'll be like, 'What the hell does that mean?'"
As we speak, Braff frequently erupts into infectious bursts of laughter, and occasionally jumps to his feet to act out what he's talking about. Though he's best known for his TV and film work, he was first drawn to acting by the theatre. His parents would drive the half-hour from their New Jersey home to Manhattan to see everything from Neil Simon plays to musicals; his father also put on community theatre shows, and Braff recalls as a pivotal moment going backstage during one show. "I remember seeing him in Hello, Dolly! I must have been eight years old. The curtain opened ? and there was a full orchestra, set, lights. The whole technical side of things just seemed like magic."
Braff was talent-spotted by an agent at 13, while on a summer theatre camp. A series of high-profile near misses followed: he tried for a part in a Broadway Waiting for Godot, alongside Steve Martin and Robin Williams, but didn't get it, and was pipped at the post by Joaquin Phoenix for a role in the 1989 film Parenthood. He did get a couple of early breaks, though, appearing at the age of 14 alongside Gwyneth Paltrow in High, a one-off TV pilot set in a high school; and in 1993, at 18, he played Woody Allen and Diane Keaton's son in Manhattan Murder Mystery. "Were my parents excited?" he grins. "Are you kidding?"
A few years after studying film at Northwestern University in Illinois, Braff was working as a waiter in a French-Vietnamese restaurant in Beverly Hills. He got a call to say he'd landed the part in Scrubs. "I had about 250 bucks in my bank account. I was waiting tables, and I wasn't getting too many callbacks for TV comedies." He had, he says, been finding it hard to give his all at auditions for these shows. "I honestly didn't find them that funny. And then here was Scrubs ? and I just thought it was hilarious. But I had no idea it would get such a hardcore, loyal fanbase. When we were starting, it got moved everywhere ? it even moved fucking networks! And wherever it went, the fans would follow us."
As the show's narrator JD, Braff is the power behind Scrubs, his daydreams featuring in strange surreal skits in which doctors do battle armed with light sabres, or he gets crushed by a ton of bricks dropping right in the middle of the ward. Two years ago, though, he decided to quit the show that made his name. "I just didn't ever want to be phoning it in." Since then, aside from the flying and the writing, he's spent six months in Detroit, working alongside Rachel Weisz and James Franco on Oz, The Great and Powerful, Disney's Wizard of Oz prequel. He's also planning to direct another film this year, though he can't say what.
All of this, says Braff, comes from one central impulse: a simple desire to entertain, something that has its origins in the geeky, class-clown role he revelled in as a child and can't quite shake off. "In fifth grade," he says, "we had to write a story and read it in front of the class. When I read mine out, the class were just belly laughing. And I remember being like, 'This is the coolest!' So I want to dedicate my life to trying to make people laugh. I can't imagine doing anything else."
? All New People is at the Opera House, Manchester (0161-828 1700), 8?11 February, then touring. Details: allnewpeople.co.uk.
Guardian Extra members can get a free seat upgrade for performances of Zach Braff's All New People in Glasgow, London and Manchester. For more information, go to guardian.co.uk/extra
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/jan/30/zach-braff-comedy-play
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