Judy Reyes

She spent years in New York theater before Scrubs, a founding member of LAByrinth Theatre Company in 1992, a multicultural collective that eventually drew Philip Seymour Hoffman into its orbit as artistic director. Eight seasons as Carla Espinosa on NBC/ABC's Scrubs gave her a character who could pivot from sitcom broad to genuinely devastating without losing the audience. She won the ALMA Award for Outstanding Actress in 2006. That kind of anchor role defines a decade.

After Scrubs ended in 2009, she stayed busy without quite landing the next defining role. Devious Maids got cancelled after four seasons. Claws ran until 2022 on TNT. Birth/Rebirth premiered at Sundance in 2023 with her carrying the lead, and critics noticed she could do something beyond the TV comfort zone. Now she's running double duty at ABC: a series regular on High Potential and four episodes of the Scrubs revival, which means the network trusts her enough to anchor two shows simultaneously.

She grew up in the Bronx and attended the High School of Performing Arts before Hunter College, which sounds like a standard resume line until you factor in LAByrinth, the multicultural theater company she helped found in 1992. It started small and became a Manhattan institution. She has also spoken openly about raising a transgender daughter, a detail that doesn't fit the celebrity profile format but has been part of her public advocacy for years.