For a while, Zach Braff was embraced as an everyman – even by himself. His breakthrough role as quirky doctor John “JD” Dorian in 00s medical sitcom Scrubs marked the emergence of a new, accessible sort of star: a pinup, but the sort who resembled your college roommate, rather than the enigmatic smoothies who were then ruling the silver screen.
“JD was designed to feel accessible,” Braff says on a video call. “He wasn’t meant to be like Leo DiCaprio or someone that you’d be like, ‘Oh my God, look how handsome and perfect.’”
Over the course of the programme’s nine-year run, Braff played ball with his role as the poster-boy for boys-next-door. “I’m just like every other guy,” became an interview catchphrase. But over the years, the actor, writer and director, now 47, became detached from the idea. Maybe he wasn’t so average, after all. “I used to think everyone must be this anxious, battling depression and loneliness,” he says. “But I don’t know that they do. I’ve met people that aren’t neurotic and in their heads all the time.”
When Braff speaks, it’s with an unguarded sincerity – as well as a toothy smile and animated hand gestures – that makes it difficult to separate the man from his onscreen persona. He tells me he has tried to overcome depression his whole life, something he credits with inspiring him to make films that are “authentically and specifically” him, rather than some mainstream comedy archetype.
His latest project as writer/director, A Good Person, was conceived in 2020 after a particularly tough few years in which he lost his father, his sister, his dog of 17 years, and his best friend, the actor and singer Nick Cordero, who had been staying in Braff’s guesthouse with his wife and newborn child until he became “very, very ill” and died of complications from Covid-19.
A Good Person is about how grief tears at the fabric of life. The film follows Allison (Florence Pugh), a once-thriving young woman whose world crumbles when she is involved in a fatal car crash that kills her future sister-in-law. As she spirals into depression and substance abuse, an unlikely friendship with her would-be father-in-law (Morgan Freeman) might just save her.
“I wanted to write about grief and how people stand up after grief,” says Braff. “I wanted to write something that would feel universal, so it wasn’t necessarily about a horrific car accident, but rather about the audience’s personal low point in their own lives. It could have been a divorce, it could have been losing their job, it could have been a death.”
In his life, he says, it’s often love and friendship that have given him the strength to rebound from tragedy, “and sometimes that comes from a very different place than you might imagine”. Which is why the film spotlights a bond between two people “who would never, in any other incarnation of life, find each other, but they just so happen to be the perfect antidote for each other’s problems”.
Then, Braff says, there is the trauma that we’ve been through as a society, all the obvious and subtle ways that the pandemic has altered our lives. “In my mind, at least, it was like, we’ve been as a planet through this horrible thing, and we’re still figuring out like, ‘OK, but what now?’ This fucked us up in so many ways, including in subconscious ways we haven’t even realised yet. How do we recover and stand back up from that?”
As an actor, Braff starred in films including The Last Kiss (2006), The Ex (2006) and last year’s remake of Cheaper by the Dozen. Previous directing credits include the 2014 film Wish I Was Here, a film partly funded by Kickstarter. But in many ways, A Good Person is closest to Braff’s directorial debut, the 2004 cult-classic Garden State.
Braff, who was 25 when he wrote the script, starred as a depressed actor who returns to his home town for his mother’s funeral. Shot on a budget of $2.5m, the film grossed more than $35m at the global box office and helped cement Braff as the figurehead for a generation of shy twentysomethings who listened to the Shins, worshipped manic pixie dream girls and wore their melancholy as proudly as a pair of distressed Converse.
Braff also sees the connection. “I think both A Good Person and Garden State are authentically me in different times of my life. There are so many people making content, the second you start trying to be somebody else, I don’t think the odds are that it’s going to work out.
“I’m a sucker for love that cannot be,” he says about a theme that is prevalent in both films. “The universe is conspiring to have their love not happen.”
Braff and Pugh dated for three years, including during the film’s shoot, and the couple became the subject of some online finger-wagging due to their 21-year age gap. At one point, Pugh even shared a lengthy Instagram video in which she chastised the trolls and critics, declaring that no one had the right to tell her “who I should and should not love”.
While they are no longer together, the pair remain close. “I was just in awe of her,” Braff says. “You can’t find an actor from Meryl Streep to someone fresh out of school that doesn’t think Florence is a pretty extraordinary talent. There’s just something about her, she’s got that movie star quality. And it’s natural – she’s not trained classically in any way. It’s just in her blood, in her soul.”
Pairing her with Freeman, he says, “was like the great old Jedi Master Yoda [acting opposite] the young, exciting ingenue”. And while he didn’t write the script with Freeman in mind – because he “never fathomed that he’d say yes to a low-budget indie” – Braff finally mustered the courage to approach him after asking himself: “Why are you being a wimp?”
“Soon my phone rang, and I remember it was Florence who held it up to me because it said ‘Morgan Freeman’ across the top. I answered it and without even saying ‘Hey Zach’ or anything he just said: ‘I see myself on every page of the script.’”
Braff hails from South Orange, New Jersey, which features in a number of his movies because, he says, “it’s a suburb, but one that’s only a 25-minute train ride away from Manhattan, the epicentre of one of the most major cities on Earth”. He likens it to a fork in the road: “You can either get on the train and go on a quest or you can stay in the small town and never leave.” It was “surreal” to film with Freeman at his childhood haunts including his local pond and inside his former principal’s office.
It’s hard not to see the film – perhaps Braff’s whole career, post-Scrubs – as a form of catharsis: of returning to his roots to expunge the ghosts, of getting ever more specific and more personal. And sharing if not his exact story, then at least his own coping mechanisms, does seem to have helped. “My sister had an aneurysm and it was the fucking worst time of our life,” he says. “We’re sitting in the ICU waiting room in total silence watching a half-full fish tank and one fish that just looks miserable, and there’s really bad art on the walls and we’re swiping tears. And then someone makes a joke and we all just start belly-laughing.
“The human body and soul needs that release. If you hit an audience with too much melodrama and tragedy, they can’t really digest it. It’s like hitting the same note in a piece of music over and over again.”
• A Good Person is in cinemas in the UK on 24 March and on Sky Cinema and Now from 28 April.
