‘Firefly Lane’ Fans Will Recognize Kate From ‘Scrubs’ and ‘Roseanne’

Netflix‘s new show Firefly Lane examines the longterm friendship of two women at different phases of their lives. Starring Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke as Tully and Kate, they go from teenagers to their twenties to staring down the barrel of their forties and how their friendship adapts. Chalke explained to The Wrap that mining the depths of the character over the course of so many years. “It’s such a cool experience, because you have so much material,” Chalke said. “To find Kate at 18 versus up in her 40s, that was one of my favorite parts of the job. … Seeing her go from this very insecure, vulnerable kid to growing up and trying to find her voice, to wanting to be married and have kids and live that life, and then realizing that she actually would like to find that other creative part of herself again.

While fans know Heigl from Grey’s Anatomy and several romantic comedies, Sarah Chalke should also be familiar to many. Chalke began her career taking over the role of Becky on Roseanne from 1993 until 1997. Chalke was 16 when she took on the role and even appeared on the reboot of Roseanne as a different character in 2018. “I had an incredible experience the first time around,” Chalke told reporters on the press tour in 2018. “I am so grateful to Roseanne for taking a chance on a kid from Canada.”

However, her breakout role was playing Dr. Elliot Reid on Scrubs for nine years. “With the Scrubs pilot, I’d just moved to LA a couple of months before with my best friend,” she told Digital Spy. “We didn’t know anyone. We never had any plans. We had plans to go to a show, and I got two auditions for the next morning. I’m so Type A, and normally I work on an audition from the second I get it until the second I go in the room. And I was like, ‘I’m not cancelling. I’m not cancelling these plans. Whatever these two auditions are, I’m not cancelling these plans.’”

However, Chalke changed her tune when she actually read the Scrubs pilot script. “I got home at midnight, and I read the Scrubs pilot, and I was like, ‘Oh, s—,’” she exclaimed. “This is really, really, really good. I want this so badly!’ And the audition was at 9am. So I thought, ‘OK, I’ll skip the other audition, and I’ll just focus on the Scrubs one’. I went in the next morning at 9, and, yeah, I’ll never forget the moment that Bill [Lawrence, showrunner] called me and was like, ‘You’ve got it’.”

Chalke also went on to guest star on How I Met Your Mother and currently stars as Beth on cult cartoon Rick & Morty. “This show, more than any other show I’ve worked on, I get approached by friends saying, ‘I want to do a voice, I want to be on it,’ because everybody loves to watch it,” Chalke told The Canadian Press. “I think part of the reason of why it’s resonated with people so much is because the humour is so funny and so smart, and also it dives into much bigger questions about life and the universe and our position in it.” You can stream Firefly Lane currently on Netflix.