ZACH BRAFF - On Love.Loss &Needing to Laugh

WHILE MOURNING HIS SISTER, FATHER AND BEST FRIEND, WHO DIED IN  CLOSE SUCCESSION, THE FORMER SCRUBS STAR POURED HIS HEART INTO WRITING AND DIRECTING THE DRAMEDY A GOOD PERSON 

- ERIC ANDERSSON

A few years ago Zach Braff decided to take his broken heart and turn it into art (to paraphrase the late Carrie Fisher). His sister Shoshana died of complications from an aneurysm in 2018 at age 46, and a few months later he lost his father, Hal, to cancer at 84. "I knew I wanted to write about grief," explains the actor, director and writer. "Then the pandemic hit."

Shortly after Braff started putting pen to page in 2020, Nick Cordero, his close friend and former costar in the Broadway show Bullets Over Broadway the Musical, caught COVID-19 and was hospitalized with severe complications. Cordero had just moved into the guesthouse of Braff's L.A.-area home with his wife, Amanda Kloots, and their newborn son Elvis, so Braff had a horrifying front-row seat as his friend's health rapidly deteriorated because of the virus. "I was watching his wife, with her brandnew baby, deal with this tragedy and deal with him eventually dying," continues Braff, 48. Kloots, now a cohost of The Talk, became one of his storytelling inspirations. "I was like, 'God, how does she start over?"" he says.  "This is what came out of me."

"This" is the poignant dramedy A Good Person (in theaters now), starring Braff's ex-girlfriend Florence Pugh, 27, as Allison, a New Jersey pharmaceutical rep who develops a painkiller addiction after she's the driver in a car crash that kills her fiancé's sister. When she finally seeks treatment, she forms a tentative friendship with her would-be father-in-law Daniel (Morgan Freeman), a recovering alcoholic. Instead of adapting what his loved ones went through, Braff chose to focus on addiction, because, he says, "it's such an American story."