Getting Into Character: McGinley says everyone knows someone like his Are We Done Yet? character Chuck Mitchell Jr. “The number one thing I didn’t want to do is make Chuck psychotic. …This guy keeps overcompensating for everything. He’s a person we all know who’s always doing something," said McGinley. "It’s like John Candy’s character at the end of Planes, Trains. When Steve [Martin] finally invites him in to join his family for Christmas, John accepts because we find out he has no place else to go. Well, Chuck doesn’t have a family and it’s this huge missing piece. So in the context of the film, it becomes at Cube’s family’s expense, or Cube’s expense. He kind of adopts them without them knowing it, or in fact hijacks them. That’s delicious stuff.
The way not to make Chuck a Jim Carrey-kind of psychopath, was to work backwards from the missing piece, to borrow from Shel Silverstein, the missing piece is his wife is gone. In fact, it’s the only lie he tells Cube the whole movie. He tells him that she’s on tour in China. Well, she’s not on tour in China. It’s the only lie he tells, so it comes back to bite him.
There was this lovely poem that I saw before we did the film by Mari Evans and it goes: ‘If there be sorrow, let it be for things undone, undreamed, unrealized and to these add one: love withheld [restrained].’ That’s what I wanted Chuck to be. I wanted him to not withhold love. So working from there, the way he expresses his love and the way he feels he’s contributing to Cube is the way he expresses love. The way it impacts Cube is what kind of hopefully gives birth to funny stuff.”
Showing Off His Body: Appearing sans shirt is becoming a thing for McGinley who recently stripped to his underwear in the film Wild Hogs. Asked if his topless scenes in Are We Done Yet? were written that way or if that was his choice, McGinley replied, “No, it’s always my choice. Gotta show the bod. I’m kidding! You’re not going to be in a stand-up paddleboard with anything on, for God’s sake. Fire dancing, which they taught me how to do, you don’t want to have anything flammable on with those two foot flames shooting out. It’s in your best interest not to have any clothes on. The stand up paddleboarding was a pretty good example of the producers inviting me to bring as much John McGinley stuff to the character as I wanted, because it was written me in a kayak with the kids. I thought it would be infinitely more interesting and, borrowing from a Christ mythology of walking on water, just kind of standing on this standup paddleboard and contributing to Cube’s character’s sense of inadequacy towering above him with the children. It worked out almost kind of in a subliminal way just being above him, even on water, and adding to his sense of inadequacy.”
It’s All About the Hair: “That was pretty calculated in my head,” explained McGinley. “I wanted my hair really long because I have pretty sharp features and longer hair softens some of my features. That’s what the thinking was. The longer my hair gets, the more ratty and curly it gets, and that’s exactly where I wanted Chuck’s to be. I just wanted him to have a mop on his head that he probably hasn’t washed it since his wife died. It’s just this curly rose bush and that’s what my hair is when it’s long.”
Choosing Film Roles: “Let’s see, what’s the criteria for doing films in the hiatus? A) schedule, if it fits in, first and foremost. The fact of the matter is this film wasn’t done on the hiatus because Cube’s CD met with a lot of success and so he spontaneously scheduled a tour to support it, as a musician does. The film got pushed from now last year, around about May, to July. We go back always the first week of August so I did Scrubs and Are We Done Yet? at the same time, which is kind of astonishing that it got pulled off.
I was living at Burbank airport and it was right about the time some British jack**s decided to carry something that he got arrested for, some liquid, so none of us were allowed to bring frickin’ anything on airplanes. Going to Canada’s an international flight so that was a real charm. I’d like to send a big shout out to that jack**s and hope he burns in hell for the lines I had to stand in. So I actually did Are We Done Yet? and Scrubs concurrently. That’s a long-winded answer to it. It’s schedule and then whether or not something’s on the page. You get sick and tired of somebody telling you, ‘Oh, we’re going to find it on the day.’ You know what we’re going to find on the day? A burnt out light and a makeup artist who forgot the blush, and also the prop broke. We’re going to shoot what’s on the page. We’re not going to find anything on the day. The stuff they sent me for this hiatus is not on the page so I don’t want to do it.”
Releasing the Patented Perry Cox Rant: McGinley doesn’t unleash one of his Scrubs-ish rants on any of his Are We Done Yet? co-stars, but the actor did offer an explanation as to how the rants came about. “The Coxonian dress down which invariably commences with a cross gendering girl’s name diatribe? That all started out with one of my friends who’s a big famous actor. I can’t tell you who but he was just acting like just a big queen diva. We just started addressing her as HER because she was being HER. It had nothing to do with anything other than…oh god, the name’s going to slip. We just had to even the score a little bit.
Then I met Zach [Braff] and it seemed like she needed to be knocked down a peg, so I just started cross gendering her too. Cut to six years later and 80 or 100 names, one of the Scrubs fanatics online have made a list of every single girl’s name I called Zach. Of course that begs the question, do you have anything better to do with your time? The answer’s no. ‘Let’s see, what’d he call him this week?’.”
