Emmy Talk: 'Childrens Hospital' Star Erinn Hayes On The Challenge of a Serious Series Finale

After seven seasons spent spoofing medical procedural shenanigans, Childrens Hospital creator/star Rob Corddry declared his popular Adult Swim series DOA this past spring. The announcement caught both viewers and even cast members by surprise. “None of us knew,” says Erinn Hayes, who played fan favorite Lola Spratt. “We thought there was another season for sure.”

At least both the series, as well as Hayes herself, gets to enjoy a bit of a victory lap after checking out of the Adult Swim line-up. The actress scored her first-ever Emmy nomination, appearing amongst the five performers eligible for the Outstanding Actress in a Short Form Comedy or Drama Series statue. That’s one of four nominations earned by Childrens Hospital in its final season; Corddry and co-star Rob Huebel are also nominated in the Outstanding Actor category (they talked to Yahoo TV about their surprise nomination in this hilarious video) and the show itself is competing in the Outstanding Short Form Comedy or Drama Series race as well. (It earned back-to-back Emmys in 2012 and 2013 for short format live action entertainment programs.)

“It’s beyond thrilling to go out like this,” Hayes says. “Like my dad would say, ‘I’m jazzed, man!’” We spoke with the actress about how she learned about her Emmy nomination and what it was like to end a wacky comedy like Childrens Hospital on a surprisingly dramatic note.

Which episode from the final season did you choose to submit for Emmy consideration?
We submitted the first part of the series finale, “The Grid, Part 1.” That’s the one where you think Lola’s gone crazy, and then it turns out she’s not — it’s just The Matrix, y’all! [Laughs] That’s such a fun episode, because you learn the story through Lola’s eyes. It starts out like a regular Childrens Hospital episode and then gets quite dramatic! That was quite bizarre for all of us to do an episode with absolutely no jokes. We’re so used to falling back on that, so we’d read scenes and say, “This could be funny,” and they were like, “Absolutely no jokes.” It’s strange to do something where you don’t have the instant gratification of making the crew laugh, and we weren’t sure fans were going to be on board for the episode. So it was pleasantly surprising when they were.

Related: ‘Childrens Hospital’ Series Finale Postmortem: Rob Corddry Explains It All

Especially when it’s the series finale! You don’t want to have them walking away from the show thinking, “What was that?”
Yeah! But then it all wraps up very satisfyingly with the behind the scenes moment at the very end showing that the whole episode was the pompous movie we were making. I love the last line that Ken [Marino] has, where he looks into the camera and says, “I think we created something very special here.” And then when I learned the show was ending, it made me cry. I was like, “Oh we have, haven’t we?”

Childrens Hospital was deliberately designed to essentially be a new show every episode, but did you have a consistent throughline in your own head for Lola?
I don’t think there’s a throughline for any of the characters. And that goes back to the pilot. When Rob sent me the script, he wanted me to play Cat Black [the role played by Lake Bell]. But when I read it, I gravitated towards Lola. The fact that she was kind of an a–hole in the first script is something I was really interested in doing. She doesn’t really give a s–t about anybody except for Cat; there’s this unrequited love between the two of them that jumps back and forth all the time. But we had the advantage of starting fresh every episode with our characters. It was like: “Oh, I’m an expert hacker, but I’m also an incredible impressionist. Oh, I’m a spy? Oooh, I’m also a lawyer. Oh, I dabble in drugs — sweet!” Anything was possible, and that was incredible.

Was there a defining characteristic that you wanted Lola to have even with her ever-changing backstory?
It really was more of a point of view: she’s invested in the hospital, but also really over it all the time. Like she’s into it, but not really. Do you see how much non-thought I’ve put into playing a character for seven years? [Laughs] I don’t think I ever said, “Lola would never do that.” There’s nothing she would or wouldn’t do.

Some of the your fellow cast members, like Lake Bell, wrote and directed several episodes. Was that something you hoped to do?
I only recently started writing more, and when I write, that format of “jokes, jokes, jokes” is not where I feel the most comfortable. I was just starting to wrap my head around writing an episode; I hadn’t said the words out loud to them but they were building in my brain. In this show in particular, the cast would get all the scripts upfront and we’d be greedy to act in them. We’d have these table reads where we’d read seven or 10 episodes and you’d see where you’d stand in the season. And the writers would see that, too, and say, “We don’t have a lot of that person,” and then would juggle things around. I scored big by being fully available for the last season. There were a lot of scheduling conflicts [with other actors], so there was a while where everything was coming up Lola. And I was not sad about it!

When I spoke with Rob Corddry about the series finale, he called you his “Swiss Army Knife,” pointing out how you could do so much.
Rob is so awesome. It’s really a testament to him that he put together a wonderful group to work with for such an extended period of time. I remember Henry Winkler [who played hospital administrator Sy Mittleman] saying at one point: “There’s going to be a day where we look back on this and go, ‘What a wonderful time.‘” At the time, I thought, “Yeah, that’s five years from now.” But now I’m thinking, “What a prophet!”

What was your “morning of” Emmy nomination story?
I knew I was on the list of possibilities, and I was thrilled for that. So I said, “I’m going to do this, I’m going to watch the nominations!” I turned on the live feed and of course I didn’t even pause to think, “Erinn, you dummy, they’re not going to list all 100-and-something categories!” They did the 12 that people care about, and then said that the rest are online. I looked online really quickly, and I think I did an audible gasp when I saw my name because my daughters were in the other room and came running in. I told them, “Look guys, that’s my name!” I was very giddy. Within 20 minutes, they were sick of me being on the phone with people saying congratulations. They were like, “Is today going to be all about you being on the phone?” So I said, “Guess we’re going to the park.”

Besides yourself obviously, is there any nominee that you’re rooting for? Your Childrens Hospital co-stars Rob Corddry and Rob Huebel are nominated as well.
I’m campaigning on the platform of “Anyone But Rob.” I just want everyone to keep guessing which Rob. [Laughs] It’s so exciting to go through this with them. I am very much rooting for my friend Constance Zimmer to win for her performance on UnREAL. I think she’s incredible, and has been incredible in everything she’s done over the years. And I would be so thrilled if Louie Anderson won for Baskets. That performance is a national treasure.

Related: Emmy Talk: Louie Anderson on the Inspiration Behind Christine Baskets

This fall, you’ll be back on TV in the CBS sitcom Kevin Can Wait opposite Kevin James. That show is the opposite extreme of Childrens Hospital in a lot of ways.
Yeah, it’s going to be the kind of show where the tone is going to be the same every week. Kevin and I hit it off immediately, and it’s been great working with him and the whole cast. With Childrens Hospital, we got to mess around with tone and genre, and that was the fun of it. Lola had a distinct point of view, but she was a character who one week was in an Our Town kind of play, the next week an espionage thriller, and the next a romantic comedy. That made the job unlike anything I’ve done before. Hopefully I’ll get to do something like it again in the future; Rob has always talked about doing a movie or a special, but that would probably be more in the Monty Python tradition of the same actors playing different characters. I don’t think there will ever be another experience like Childrens Hospital.

Season 7 of Childrens Hospital can be watched on AdultSwim.com.