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The cast of “Scrubs” had quite the night at the 2001 NBC Upfronts in New York — especially Donald Faison. On their new podcast “Fake Doctors, Real Friends,” Faison and Zach Braff recounted having too much to drink during their first big event after getting picked up by NBC. “Donald was going around giving everyone …
The cast of “Scrubs” had quite the night at the 2001 NBC Upfronts in New York — especially Donald Faison.
On their new podcast “Fake Doctors, Real Friends,” Faison and Zach Braff recounted having too much to drink during their first big event after getting picked up by NBC.
“Donald was going around giving everyone noogies, and I look over, and Donald has Jeff Zucker, the president of the network, in a full headlock,” Braff, 45, said. “He’s giving him a drunken noogie on his bald head and I hear Jeff Zucker go, ‘Please, Donald, no!’”
In an attempt to defend himself, Faison, 45, explained, “You know, at this point I’m giving everybody love because I’m so excited that we’re on the network, it’s going down and I look over and I see Jeff Zucker, in my mind Scott Sassa’s assistant [another former NBC exec] standing over by the bar … and I’m like, ‘Hey you, come over here’ and he’s like ‘no, no, no, no’ … I march over to him drunk as can be and put him in a headlock … and I’m grabbing him, giving Jeff Zucker a noogie.”
Faison added that a few days later “Scrubs” creator Bill Lawrence asked him if he really gave Zucker — who is now the president of CNN — a noogie and said “he’s not really happy about it.”
“I don’t think he was genuinely pissed off,” Faison said. “But he stayed away from me for a really long time.”
Braff then confirmed that when Zucker came to set, he stayed far away from Faison.
“He was very, very afraid of me,” Faison said.
Other highlights, according to the pair, included co-star Sarah Chalke “stumbling” up to them and asking, “Have you guys ever heard of a cosmopolitan? They’re great,” as well as co-star Judy Reyes’ husband taking her home after she did a flip on a trapeze-like bar while wearing a dress.