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• Longer bio on Mr. McGinley
• Official site of "Buddy Walk"

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Tavis: Actor John C. McGinley has played a host of memorable characters in films like 'Any Given Sunday,' 'Nothing to Lose,' 'Identity,' and 'The Rock.' I loved that one. He's currently enjoying success on the small screen each week on the NBC series 'Scrubs.' Here he is as the irascible Dr. Perry Cox.

Carla: He's crashing. He needs to be intubated.

Elliot: Dr. Cox!

Dr. Cox: Ah, it's just dandy. I got a billion patients and no rooms, I got newbie pestering me for advice on how to be the best woman at Turtlehead's wedding, and I got a resident who can't do a simple procedure even though she learned it the first week she was here.

Elliot: I'm sorry, Dr. Cox. I don't know what to do.

Dr. Cox: I'll tell you what to do. Get the hell out of here. I swear to God, Carla, if one more annoying thing comes my way, please just go ahead and extract some of that extra air out of Barbie's head and inject it right into my veins.

Tavis: Ha ha ha! John C., nice to see you.

John C. McGinley: What a pleasure.

Tavis: Pleasure's mine. You like playing this character?

John: Yeah. It's the best gig I've ever had. The best gig ever.

Tavis: But tell me in real life you're nothing like Dr. Perry Cox.

John: Well, I don't think I'm as smart as him, and I don't necessarily know if I'm a mentor to anybody other than my 6-year-old son, but I think he's mentoring these people on a whole different frequency, and I think what he's trying to do is to elevate them to save lives and not lose lives. So that's a heck of a responsibility.

Tavis: I'm glad you said that. I'm about to ask you, you call that mentoring? That sounded like a beat-down to me, a verbal beat-down.

John: It's called teaching with a spoonful of dirt, a spoonful of dirt and then a little sugar every once in a while.

Tavis: It works. You mentioned your son Max. I'm glad you went there, as I figured you would, 'cause everything I've read about you, every time I've ever seen you, Max--Whoever Max is, and he's your son obviously. But Max comes up all the time. You love this guy Max. You talk about him all the time. In my research for our conversation, I realize, or learned, more about why it is that you took the role on 'Scrubs.' You took it in part because of Max. So now that Max's name has come up in the first 60 seconds of our conversation, tell me who Max is and why Max is so special.

John: Max is a 6-year-old boy who is my son. He was born with Down Syndrome, and, uh, he just kind of--It was--Everybody always says the same thing, it changed your life, blah blah blah. But I didn't even know what Down Syndrome was before Max was born. And, uh, a really profound thing happens when a child is born with special needs to the parents. The first thing you do is you just beat yourself up. "Why me? What did I do?" And then with Max, because he spent the first couple of weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit, after a while after you stop feeling sorry for yourself and beating yourself up, and it's bad, you see this kid in the neonatal intensive care unit looking up at you and going, like, "Soon as you're over yourself, I could use a little help here." And all of a sudden, all of your love and life and focus goes on this little knucklehead, and you start to just, uh, give, and you get twice as much back. And he's just this beautiful little boy who developmentally has exploded over the last couple of years. Um, unfortunately, we had a seizure disorder right between second and third year, and then that abated, and now this kid is just flourishing.

Tavis: When you said that you beat yourself up for days, uh, asking, "Why me? Why me? Why me?" what did you ever conclude there? You mentioned that you finally got around to getting over yourself and you spent some time with Max, which I'm sure Max appreciates. Uh, but in answer to that question, what did you discover?

John: That God blessed us with this kid. It turned out it was a blessing, not a curse, and it's a little confusing and wildly disorienting up front until you realize that this is a blessing that all of a sudden has been thrown into your life.

Tavis: I guess the question is, what makes Max a special blessing for you? Anybody--I'm not a parent yet, so I suspect that anybody who has a child--maybe my mother would disagree because of me. But I would assume I'm a blessing to my mother, so I assume that any child is a blessing to his or her parents. But there are folk who I suspect would look at a child who has special needs and say "Man, why me?" and maybe not see it as a blessing. You chose that word very carefully. Why do you say that Max and that condition that he has is a blessing?

John: Because it allowed me to discover what love was. I didn't in retrospect really know what love was, and then Max to me is love. And so every time I look at him, I see love, and I get a light, and that feels like it completes me as a human being, uh, or enables me to move along in a more complete way.

Tavis: Mm. Back to my earlier point about why you took 'Scrubs.' So I read somewhere that you took 'Scrubs' in part because it would get you off the road doing all the films that you do all the time and give you a chance to spend more time at home with Max, and so--so we have Max to thank for seeing you on 'Scrubs' every week.

John: It's kind of a gypsy's bargain being a character actor--I guess an actor in general, because most of the time if you're lucky enough to get work, it involves going to Toronto, going to, in the case of 'The Rock,' San Francisco; 'Platoon,' the Philippines. And those are always 3- and 4-month chunks, and you gotta just pick it up and go. And you're not gonna return home from, um, Calgary every weekend. You're not gonna return home from Manila every other weekend. You're gonna go, and you're gonna commit, and you're gonna stay there. And I've been lucky enough to do that 50 or 60 times, and when Max came along, I just--I absolutely had to be around this kid as much as possible. Uh, and so we just kind of changed course a little bit, and I started to audition a lot for TV pilots, which was new to me. And there's a lot of chefs in the kitchen in TV, and so--When you're on a set with Oliver Stone, if you want an answer, you go ask Oliver. In TV, there's a lot of different people, or at least in half-hour TV there's a lot of people who have their--you know, their hands in the process. And so that was very strange and different, and there was some concessions to be made, but I auditioned for 'Scrubs' 5 or 6 times. I got the gig, and now it's up and running, and it feels pretty fantastic.

Tavis: Let me ask you an inside TV question, 'cause I'm fascinated about what you just said to me. With all these cooks in the kitchen versus the one chef on the Oliver Stone set, how does that impact the work that you do as an actor? You made that point, I suspect, for some reason. Um, how does that impact, if at all, the kind of work you do as a thespian on TV versus the one boss on the movie set?

John: Well, luckily on 'Scrubs' there's a guy who started 'Spin City,' a young guy named Bill Lawrence, and he's the quarterback at 'Scrubs.' And so if you have a question on our set, which happens to be a hospital, you go to Billy, and you get an answer. But a lot of times Billy has to, you know, if he wants to make changes--Disney is the producer, and for all intents and purposes, NBC is the exhibitor. They all have input, and Billy's got to assimilate all this stuff, and how it impacts him and trickles down to us is what's different.

Tavis: The big news on your show the last couple of weeks is Michael J. Fox. So speaking of the guy, Billy, who started 'Spin City,' he and Michael J. Fox are good friends, obviously, from that series, and so he invites Michael J. Fox to come on the show. We hadn't seen the guy in a while, and 'Scrubs' gets a big bump 'cause Michael J. drops by.

John: I'll tell you what happened. Uh, it just made me think of this--Michael came into my dressing room, which are hospital rooms, um, and we had a chance to talk for, I don't know, 15 to 20 minutes, and we happened to be on a Tuesday to Saturday schedule, as opposed to Monday to Friday. And so my son was visiting the hospital that day, and we were in the room, and you know, we had 'The Wiggles' going, and we had 'Barney.' We had everything going, and my room had been transformed. And Michael came in, and we're talking, and Max is quite distant with adult males, um, until he can kind of get their vibe. And 20 minutes into this, as Michael's leaving, Max goes over to Michael J. Fox and gives him a hug, which is very unusual--uh, actually, extremely unusual. And I remember sitting there, watching Max hug Michael J. Fox, and all I could think--Michael, of course, has Parkinson's, and Max has Down Syndrome--and I couldn't help but think, "I wonder if Max clocked into Michael's frequency," if he sensed maybe, you know, that people were compromised in different ways and got dealt kind of an altered hand. And my son went over and hugged Michael J. Fox and then let him go, and he went back. And it was extraordinary.

Tavis: I'm glad you told me that, 'cause when I do meet Max, if he doesn't give me a hug, I'm not gonna take it personally. Ha ha ha! He's standoff-ish with adult males.

John: He is.

Tavis: OK. So Oliver Stone, speaking of adult males, you mentioned him a moment ago. You've worked, by my count--

John: Oliver is an adult male.

Tavis: Very much an adult male. By my count you've worked on at least 6 films with Oliver Stone. What is it about this guy that keeps you coming back?

John: Well, uh, I originally auditioned for 'Platoon' when I was cast as Tom Berenger's radio man.

Tavis: You were great in that, by the way.

John: Thank you. uh, and so that's 1984, right when I got out of school. And then the film was canceled, and 2 years later was up again, and the role that I originally then would play--John Spencer from 'The West Wing' pulled out of 'Platoon,' 'cause it was an low-budget independent film that was gonna be shot in the Philippines, and John got a play on Broadway. And I went in and auditioned again, and I got John's role. And so I got to be the fourth lead. And, um, from...This is a little trite, but from being in battle together, I think Oliver and I kind of got on the same page. And so then 2 years later we're doing 'Wall Street.' I had already worked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as a summer job, and then the next film was 'Talk Radio.' I did the play before Oliver was associated with it. And then, in retrospect that all seems to make sense.

Tavis: Yeah, you guys just connected in different ways.

John: Yeah. And then we got 3 under our belt, and the next ones followed.

Tavis: I gotta go right quick. Um, now that you're doing a weekly TV thing, any desire to get back to film at some point later on?

John: Sure. Um, we have these huge hiatuses which are unbelievably generous, and there's enough time to do as many films as you want.

Tavis: Well, I'm delighted to have met you.

John: What a pleasure.

Tavis: Please give my best to Max.

John: I will indeed.

Tavis: I appreciate that. John C. McGinley, better known as Max's dad now. That's our show for tonight. As always you can catch me on the radio on NPR, and I'll see you back here next time on PBS. Until then, thanks for watching. Good night from Los Angeles, and keep the faith.