Interview: Zach Braff, actor, comedian and director

AS A CHILD, Zach Braff wanted to fly a plane. Now he can. He also had a fantasy about writing a play. Now he has. So who’s to say his dream of getting married on a Scottish cliff might not become reality too?

When Zach Braff wants to quiet his mind, he flies a plane. Actually, not a plane, his plane. Frankly, I can think of few things more stressful than being solely responsible for the machine that is keeping me suspended thousands of feet in the air, but Braff insists that, up in the clouds, life is simpler.

“You have so much to focus on, monitoring your instruments and being safe,” he says, “the practicalities of flying and speaking on the radio and being aware of everything that’s going on.”

I feel a little disquieted just listening to him and am struggling to get rid of the image of JD from Scrubs as the captain.

“Flying a plane is all scanning – scanning your instruments, scanning outside – and so there’s not much room for being obsessive or being lost in thinking about other problems in your life,” he says. “For someone a bit neurotic it quiets your mind. In an odd way it’s meditative.”

My facial expression obviously isn’t quite doing what it should because he looks perplexed. It’s a bit of a fantasy hobby, isn’t it? I say feebly, trying not to be insulting while simultaneously thinking of John Travolta in his pretend captain’s outfit and Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden flying holidaymakers to Lanzarote.

“I’m flying a little single-engine four-seater,” he says. “I’m not in an Oprah Winfrey Lear jet.” He lets out a big laugh. “But flying a plane is a fantasy, it’s a time machine in a sense. I live in LA and if I wanted to drive and see my mom who lives in the Bay Area it’s a six-hour drive. The fun of the little plane is that I can load in a couple of friends and go on this adventure. We’re there in an hour and a half. I always loved planes as a kid but I never thought I’d actually fly one. It’s cool.”

Fulfilling childhood ambitions is turning into a bit of a habit for Braff. Sitting in a swanky London pad hired for interview purposes (“I’m pretending this is my house,” he says when I arrive) he looks like someone who recently got off a transatlantic flight. The shape of his hair suggests fluffy feather pillow rather than one of those meagre little foam ones, but still. There’s nothing sleepy about his chat though. He’s full of it, and not just about flying. Maybe it’s the coffee, in a cup roughly the size of a small tower block, although he doesn’t touch it while I’m there. Or maybe it’s that he’s genuinely excited about what we’re meeting to talk about: his play All New People.

Braff is best known for his long-running role as Dr John ‘JD’ Dorian in Scrubs of course. For nine seasons of the hospital comedy he perfected his dorky, goofy man-child. He was nominated for an Emmy and a Golden Globe and, beyond acting, he got involved in rewriting scripts as well as directing a few episodes. The show brought him to a worldwide audience and it bought him time and the financial clout to follow other interests.

The show was made during eight months of each year, then the cast and crew would get four months off. A hiatus is how Braff describes it. Some might take the chance to go to the beach, to visit faraway places or learn how to play the ukulele. Not Braff. In the first of these he took to the boards in New York’s Central Park in a production of Twelfth Night at the Delacourt Theatre. In one of his next breaks, he made his film Garden State, which he wrote, directed and starred in opposite Natalie Portman. And now there’s All New People.

Sometimes when Hollywood actors announce they’re going to take to the stage, it’s a bit of a worry. Why would they do that? Will they be any good? Fewer decide to actually write a play as well as star in it, but with Braff, there’s nothing complicated about the motivation. In fact, it’s simple: writing a play (like flying a plane) was a childhood dream.

The first part he landed straight out of college was on stage in Macbeth, he says, when I ask about his life-long love of theatre.

“George Wolfe directed and it starred Alec Baldwin, Angela Bassett, Liev Schreiber and Michael Hall,” he says, showing off, but nicely. “I was Fleance.” He credits a professor at college with “opening his eyes to theatre on another level”, introducing him to Shakespeare and Pinter, Albee and Stoppard, “the greats”, but actually his love affair with the stage started much earlier, when he was very young. And the man who really opened his eyes was his dad, Hal.

It’s not that the Braffs are an acting dynasty; they are not the Fondas or the Redgraves of New Jersey. His dad is a lawyer, but he was also a leading light on the local am dram scene.

“He’s the Olivier of New Jersey regional theatre,” Braff Jnr guffaws. “So me, being the young kid looking up to my dad, went to see all these shows, everything from Neil Simon’s Prisoner of Second Avenue to Hello Dolly! I was really taken with it at a very young age, I’m talking eight years old. Initially it wasn’t so much the performing. I loved gadgets so I liked the lights and the set changes and the crew guys were so cool to me. So it became a thing that me and my dad did together.”

When other kids were getting into little league and the like, Braff and his dad were taking trips to New York to see plays. Inevitably, the next step was a place at the legendary theatre summer camp in the Catskills, Stagedoor Manor, which boasts alumni including Gwyneth Paltrow, Robert Downey Jnr and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

“It was for kids that just loved theatre,” says Braff. “I did a play and lots of classes. I mean, I was 13 years old and in advanced acting class, doing these fantasy exercises and totally legitimate acting studies. I loved it. And I knew from that age on that that’s what I’d do.” Braff got scouted by a manager and started working in film and TV, but theatre remained a priority and the idea of writing his own play lingered. Then a trip to Long Beach Island planted a seed.

Braff grew up in New Jersey so summer holidays were often spent on Long Beach Island (known as the Jersey Shore before the reality TV show ruined that reference). A few years ago he decided to rent a beach house for his dad’s birthday so that all the family could gather together. The way it works is that you go to view the houses in winter, when the island is deserted, to choose the one you want for the following summer. For Braff the experience was profound.

“I’d only been there in the summer when there’s a quarter of a million people, it’s packed. Then I went in the winter and it was like 28 Days Later, that zombie movie where everyone is gone. There was no one. And the beach was covered in snow, which was really spooky, and all these iconic summer things – water slides and mini golf – were covered in snow and there wasn’t a person in sight. I just thought it was so f***ing lonesome and isolating and I had to write something about it.”

And so, his play had its setting. Focusing on Charlie, a suicidal 35-year-old who is one smoke away from hanging himself in his friend’s beach house, his intention to kill himself is thrown into chaos by the arrival of an estate agent, her friend, a firefighter with a minor substance abuse problem, and a prostitute. As the 90-minute comedy played in real time unfolds, it transpires that these strangers give Charlie a reason to live.

If Garden State was “an anthem for 25-year-olds” made when he was just a few years older than that himself, then All New People is aimed directly at Braff’s peers, the generation now in their mid-30s who find themselves taking stock and wondering if they’re quite where they thought they would be. What’s the fascination with these moments of crisis?

“Sad Jews in New Jersey, I guess that’s my speciality.” He blasts a laugh. “One thing Garden State and All New People truly have in common is being rescued by love. In the case of Garden State it’s the love of a woman, and in this it’s about the friendship of strangers. Charlie is a very lonely man and right at the moment when his life is about to end he is rescued by the company of strangers.”

The theme of being rescued from yourself by the love of others is something he finds “very moving”. Even Scrubs, he says, although he points out that he didn’t write it, treads similar ground. “The theme song is I Can’t Do This All On My Own,” he says, rolling his eyes. “It was about friends getting each other through the hardest times of their life.”

So these moments of crisis resonate personally as well as creatively?

“Of course,” he says with a ‘duh’ expression. “I know a lot of people but I’m kind of a loner. I only really socialise with a pretty tight group of close friends. I think that the times of my life when I’ve felt very lonely I’ve either felt saved by the companionship of someone I was in love with or friends. I think ultimately it’s all that matters; everything else goes away. What matters most, in my humble opinion, in this brief time that we have on earth, is the relationships we have and the bonds that are formed.”

It’s easy to see how Braff is the kind of person who can get movies made and how he ends up being the star and the writer and the director and the music guy (he won a Grammy for the Garden State soundtrack). He has a puppyish enthusiasm combined with serious professional drive and a preference for being in control. He’s talked in the past about being prone to obsessiveness and he makes clear that one of the things that appeals to him about theatre is the control he can assert over what he does as an actor. Originally, he wrote the part of Charlie for himself and planned to play it in the show’s first run in New York, but he was persuaded not to. It’s something he’s glad about, he says, because it allowed him to watch from the back of the theatre and tweak and change things as it went. Still, watching another actor in the role he’d written for himself wasn’t easy.

“I’m a micro manager, I had a really clear plan. When people ask me about directing myself, which I did in Scrubs and in Garden State, to me the hardest thing is conveying exactly what’s in your head to your leading actor. That’s the hardest thing. If I’m that actor then I get to cut that step out. I mean I sometimes look at the playback and think, ‘Yuh, that sucked’, but I know exactly what I want.”

Braff wouldn’t describe himself as a workaholic. He says he couldn’t be like those filmmakers who knock out a film every year. It’s true that everyone expected another film to follow Garden State (including him, he says) but it hasn’t happened because he’s never found the right project. Still, he always has something on the go, often doing one thing while moving on to the next. It makes sense that the lull that is a natural part of an actor’s life wouldn’t suit him so I wonder if he consciously avoids it?

“The lull is good sometimes when you’re exhausted,” he says. “I think after Scrubs I was pretty fried. I was throwing my hat in the ring for some things but maybe even subconsciously I was doing it a bit half-assed. Starting last year and this year, though, I feel alright, I’m back and hungry. I love to work. When you love what you do it doesn’t feel like work. And the times when it does feel like work it’s a problem.” He laughs.

It’s clear he’s excited about his play coming to the West End but I wonder if he’s nervous?

“Of course.” He rolls his eyes. “I’d be a freak not to be nervous about it. It’s not like we’re doing this in a high school gymnasium, we’re doing it at the f***ing Duke of York.” This comes out like dook (as in for apples) and we both laugh.

“But, you know, life’s too short.” He laughs some more.

He also shares the actor’s mantra that being on stage is the ultimate acting experience, a way to recharge creatively and to feel the fear. “In TV, what are you doing? Five sentences in a row. It’s all so broken up. And you can be cut together. You can get lazy. But you can’t do that in the theatre: it’s you. You can’t hide, you have to really be an actor.

“I’ve never seen a higher high as an actor than being on stage in something that’s working. If it’s a comedy and they’re laughing their asses off or if it’s a drama and it’s pin silent, there’s no higher high.”

If he really is daunted he doesn’t look it.

“I’m looking forward to visiting your nation,” he says smiling, as though I come from a distant galaxy. Are you telling me you’ve never been to Scotland, I ask?

“I’ve never been,” he says, grinning. “I hope I see some cliffs. I’ve always said I want to get married on one.” Another dream. I tell him hills and the odd mountain might be easier but whatever he finds I hope it lives up to his expectations.

He laughs, of course.

• All New People is at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, February 14 -18, tickets £12-£29.50. Call 0844 871 7648 or visit www.atgtickets.com/glasgow