Billy Joel Once Asked John C. McGinley for a Bizarre Favor (Exclusive)
John C. McGinley has had a 40-year career that’s taken him everywhere from the defunct soap Another World, to repeated collaborations with director Oliver Stone in films like Platoon and Wall Street, to the ’90s surf-thriller Point Break, to nine seasons as one of the stars of medical comedy Scrubs. The instantly-recognizable actor is a seasoned pro who has shared the screen with celebrities from Keanu Reeves to Sean Connery, but he still vividly remembers the moment in his own career when he felt most star-struck — and it didn’t occur on a set. Rather, as he recounted in a recent interview with Channel Guide, it happened backstage at a Billy Joel concert, when McGinley met the Piano Man himself — who then made an odd request of the actor.
“I was shooting a medical comedy in Kansas City, Article 99, with Kiefer [Sutherland] and Ray [Liotta], rest in peace,” McGinley told Channel Guide. “Billy Joel was coming to town. So, we got to go to the show and then go backstage.”
“When I met Billy, I was quite starstruck. But then the real starstruck thing — this was starstruck on steroids — happened. Billy calls me by my first name, and he goes, ‘John, I have Christie [Brinkley, Joel’s wife at the time] on the line. She can’t sleep until somebody reads her a bedtime story.’ And so, I told her a bedtime story.”
McGinley remains as busy as ever; his Hallmark+ holiday series, Holidazed, will be airing on the Hallmark Channel this summer as part of their “Christmas in July” event. And, as he told Channel Guide, he has multiple new comedy series on the horizon — including one that fans of 2000s TV will be thrilled to hear about. “We’re going to be wrapped by the middle of August [for the new HBO medical sitcom also starring Steve Carell],” McGinley said, “and then presumably I’ll be going off to do (I’ll be overlapping with) Scrubs. There’s no offer yet, but there will be. That’s an exciting thing for a 65-year-old white male to be able to say in 2025. We’re not exactly in vogue.”
McGinley’s Scrubs co-star Zach Braff recently became the first of the series’ stars to officially sign on for a revival of the show.
Joel recently announced that he is taking time off from touring in order to deal with recent health setbacks tied to his diagnosis of normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH). He has added, however, that he is not retiring. Brinkley recently published a memoir, Uptown Girl, that shared some difficult recollections of her marriage to her ex, which lasted from 1985 to 1994; she has publicly shared message of support for the singer since his diagnosis.
Reporting by Jacqueline Cutler