Judy Reyes has spent much of this year moving between two very different screens, and she says she is making the most of the attention. Backstage at the Lovinger Theatre at Lehman College in the Bronx, just hours before Freestyle: A Love Story was set to debut, Reyes said, “I’m milking it for all it’s about,” while talking about the revival of Scrubs and the new momentum around her work.
Earlier this year, Reyes reprised Carla Espinosa on the Scrubs reboot for four episodes, returning to Sacred Heart Hospital as the head nurse, an exhausted mother of four daughters and Dr. Christopher Turk’s partner in parenting. On the reboot, Carla is older, tired and still impossible to dodge. Reyes put it simply: “Just when you think you’re getting away with something, there’s Carla!”
The part had not faded because the character had not disappeared. Reyes said Carla’s name still lingers in the script, a reminder that the show’s original world never fully let go of her. “It did,” she said of the long-discussed reboot, adding that the project had been in the works for a long time and that the pandemic-era podcast hosted by Zach Braff and Donald Faison, along with T-Mobile commercials, brought a new generation to Scrubs. She also said ABC was willing to make the filming work and that her manager made sure the schedule was accommodating.
That flexibility mattered because Reyes was also in the middle of filming the second season of High Potential, where she plays Lieutenant Selena Soto, the head of a team of crime solvers opposite Kaitlin Olson and Daniel Sunjata. She said returning to Carla felt natural because the reboot made the characters older. “They did right by making all these characters older,” she said, noting that the story reflected the passage of time instead of pretending it had not happened.
That idea also carries into Freestyle: A Love Story, which was set to debut hours after the interview and which Reyes executive produces. The production follows two lovers who meet at a freestyle show and reconnect at a concert 20 years later, while weaving in the history of freestyle music, the Latin hip-hop and pop hybrid popularized in the 1980s by acts such as Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, George Lamond and Judy Torres. Reyes said the project reflects a larger truth about the industry and the people in it: “Latinos are lieutenants and nurses and doctors, et cetera!”
For Reyes, that larger point is the one that ties the work together. “Our very existence is political no matter what. Our joy is a problem for a lot of people,” she said, adding that “It’s really important for us to tell our stories.” The through line is clear in the roles she is playing and producing now: older women, working women, mothers, leaders and lovers, all still present, still visible and still in demand.