Judy Reyes: The No-Nonsense ‘Scrubs’ Star Has ‘High Potential’

The afternoon sun streams through floor-to-ceiling windows in a Pasadena hotel lobby and backlights Judy Reyes. Wearing a white V-neck summer dress, her hair and makeup perfect before a press conference, she looks every bit a star.

A star with common sense. Knowing that being in heels all day usually brings misery, comfortable white sneakers complete her outfit.

She’s a glamorous actress, but Reyes is also a practical woman. That no-nonsense sensibility has driven her career, from her early days on stage at the LAByrinth Theater Company with Philip Seymour Hoffman to her latest role on ABC’s High Potential, premiering Sept. 17.

“I see her as someone who’s like myself, a female Latina, middle-aged, in charge, earning her place but always having to prove who she is,” Reyes says of her character, LAPD Lieutenant Selena Soto. “As a female or whatever it is, you’re always trying to prove yourself, even as a veteran.”

Reyes is a veteran, having earned her first TV credit in 1992. Like so many New York actors, that was on Law & Order.

“When I first met with my representation, I got three jobs immediately,” she recalls. “I got a play. I got a full independent feature film, and then I got a Law & Order episode. And then I didn’t work for three-and-a-half years as an actor.”

After José Rivera’s play Cloud Teutonics, the film Jack and His Friends, and that L&O episode, Reyes had to take odd jobs to make the rent. She helped assemble pieces for a friend who designed jewelry. She sold shoes, was a cater waiter, and a restaurant hostess. In between, she looked for the next part.

Those auditions eventually led to guest spots on some of the decade’s most famous shows, NYPD Blue, Cosby, The Sopranos. Then, in 2001, she landed the breakthrough role on Scrubs.

Carla Espinosa was the perfect nurse: kind, devoid of nonsense, and hard-wired to help people. She was also a sign of roles to come. Like Zoila Diaz, Reyes’s character on Devious Maids, she was pragmatic. And like Quiet Ann on Claws, she was someone you wanted on your side. While creating distinct, memorable characters, Reyes infused each one with their humanity.

In High Potential, Reyes presents a lieutenant detective who has worked her way up in a man’s world. Of course, she’s tough; she would not have survived otherwise. Selena also exercises a usually dormant sense—she listens!

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The procedural drama stars Kaitlin Olson (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Hacks) as Morgan, a night janitor at the LAPD. Grooving to her music while cleaning, Morgan accidentally knocks over a file, its contents fanning out on the floor. Morgan looks at the photos and evidence and quickly surmises that the detectives’ work is wrong, as outlined on their clue board.

Morgan fixes the error and sets the premise for this series with that simple act.

She’s a woman of, yes, high potential.

Selena sympathizes with Morgan, a single mom of three, and recognizes her unique value. Selena insists that the cops under her do the same. It’s a pure boss move, and that sort of flex could only be done by someone with the experience to back it up. The character and the actor have that.

An honest brashness to her characters makes it feel as if Reyes is conjuring up every hard-working mom and hardened criminal she saw growing up in the Bronx. She projects the gritty determination bred into a daughter of Dominican immigrants.

Reyes did well in school and enrolled at Hunter, a City University of New York college long the ticket to a better life for smart kids of limited means. “But then I took some time off and got a job,” she says. “And then I became part of the LAByrinth Theatre Company.”

That highly regarded company began as the Latino Actors Base (LAB) and later attracted a diverse troupe. Over the years, Bobby Cannavale, Ana Ortiz, Pedro Pascal, and the late great Ron Cephas Jones were members. It’s the sort of experience that when alums talk about their days there, they reflexively smile at the memory.

“I ended up not going back (to college) because the time off was working in my favor, which is one of the things that I learned right then,” Reyes says. “If you can make a career or something work for you where you are, then keep going in that direction. As a child of immigrants, my parents were very disappointed. I was academically the best student, but I didn’t go back, and my parents got freaked out.”

Yet she trusted herself and knocked out those single-episode roles for years, which is why Reyes can accurately refer to herself as a veteran. At 56, she’s still growing, plumbing each role for new emotions to explore.

Willing to take risks, Reyes never turns in the same performance twice. Her Quiet Ann on Claws was an unheralded masterpiece. Yes, it was an over-the-top series. So? Reyes played a linguistics professor who did hard time after stabbing someone, then ended up as the muscle at a money-laundering, mobbed-up nail salon.

Preposterous? Absolutely. But Claws relished the Daliesque surrealism that flourishes in Florida. And Reyes was riveting in her portrayal of one more overqualified woman doing what she had to do to survive.

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In High Potential, it’s a fair bet that the interplay between Selena and Morgan will be a reason to watch. Selena has that world-weariness about her, but not where it’s advanced to the stage where she’s giving up.

Nor has Reyes. It’s been a journey from the Bronx, and she’s called LA home now for almost a quarter of a century since Scrubs.

“It’s been good to me,” she says of the city. “My child was born here, so as a result, we’re Angelenos.” Her child, going on 15, is trans and clearly accepted and adored by their mom.

“Once they go to college, my husband and I are looking to relocate back East, so we’ll see how that goes,” Reyes shares.

She never lost her love of New York.

“I think artistically, creatively, New York has always had so much more to offer,” Reyes says. “In terms of creative options here (in LA), it’s kind of like a one-industry town, a lot less now since COVID. And everything’s changed.”

Plus, Broadway always beckons for theater-trained actors. Asked about a dream role, Reyes acknowledges, “I mean, I have a dream to be part of Wicked. I just don’t know if I have the vocal ability. That’s been my favorite musical for the last 10 years. I’ve seen it four times, in different parts of the world. I’ve taken my kid to see it twice. My child is also a musical-theater artist."

“A legitimate play or a non-musical play, I’m totally intrigued and look forward to manifesting that in the future,” she continues.

Like any actor on a network show (as opposed to a one-and-done streamer), she’s waiting to see if High Potential catches on and is renewed. But her aspirations reach beyond the success of being on a hit show.

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“My goals are to ultimately win an Emmy, or Tony, or an Oscar or a Grammy,” she says. “But my goals are also to use the growing influence that I’ve had in my career to create opportunities for other people of color and other women of color, especially with everything that’s going on in the world.

“I have privilege and the advantage that I have as a result of my career,” Reyes continues. “And I’ve learned that also in my fifties, you create community, you create opportunity; that what you have, you have to share it with others. I don’t know that there’s any more than I need with everything that I have.”

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