Felicity Huffman Talks Joan’s Choices for Her Replacement and Chief Resident (Exclusive)

Dr. Joan Ridley (Felicity Huffman), on her last day at Westside, makes a couple major decisions. The Tuesday, March 31, episode of Doc sees her decide on her replacement — remember, she had veto power when she agreed to take the job as chief — and name chief resident.

TV Insider spoke with Felicity Huffman about those decisions, Joan’s health (she has myelodysplastic syndrome and there’s a strong chance it becomes leukemia), and more. Warning: Spoilers for Doc Season 2 Episode 19 ahead!

Joan spends the episode meeting with candidates to replace her, with Michael (Omar Metwally) by her side and finding reasons to dislike each … until he pitches himself. Joan makes him essentially interview for the position and make sure he knows he’ll be the best for the job. He then sells it to Max (Darrin Baker), pointing out that he can focus on raising money and worrying about the hospital image while Michael goes back to saving patients and training doctors.

As for chief resident, it’s between Amy (Molly Parker) and Sonya (Anya Banerjee). Joan meets with Sonya first, and she refuses to say who she’d choose in her position; to build her case, she’d have to disparage Amy, and if she earned it, she wants it to be on her own merits. By the time Joan talks to Amy, she already knows Michael is going to be her successor — but cautions Amy about thinking this means there will be two chiefs in the family.

Joan shares her concerns that Amy’s going after this position because she hates being an intern. She wants the job to go to someone who understands the responsibility and wants to teach those with “inferior knowledge.” She also calls Amy out on being focused on what she needs — Michael or Jake (Jon Ecker) or regaining her memories — and pushes her to think about why she became a doctor. Yes, it’s to help people, but Joan adds that she also wants to validate her sense of worth in the world. She needs Amy to pull greatness out of others, including Sonya. And so Joan is making them co-chief residents.

John Medland/Fox

Other key conversations Joan has throughout the day: She tells TJ (Patrick Walker) that he got the surgical residency he wanted, encourages Liz (Conni Miu) to find her voice after getting caught up in Richard’s (Scott Wolf) lie, and agrees with Richard that she does have strong feelings about him being back after what he did.

Below, Felicity Huffman breaks down Joan’s goodbye to Westside. But don’t worry: It wasn’t her last episode.

When Joan took this job, she set those terms, and I love that she’s like, “I’m sticking to those terms. I’m getting what I want.” If you’d asked her when she first took this job who she’d want her successor to be, who would she have said then?

Felicity Huffman: Ultimately, she wants Amy to be her successor, but throughout the season, she’s seen that Amy’s not quite ready — she’s capable, but I think not quite emotionally ready to take that job. She’s still recovering from losing eight years of her life and figuring out what it means to become herself again. So, if she had to choose someone, I don’t know. I think she might’ve gone far afield to some colleagues in the past, not knowing that the perfect person, as often happens, is right there in front of her, which is in the form of Michael.

Yeah. I was going to say, it kind of feels like she’s all for Michael replacing her and just wanted to make sure that he was sure of himself. That kind of seems like what she was waiting for, right?

I don’t even think until that final scene where he says, “What about me?” And I think she’s really fast on her feet that she even considers him because Michael’s great behind a desk, and the chief of the IM certainly has desk duties, but they’re really the coach of the whole team. And I didn’t know if she thought of him as that. I don’t even know that she thought of him as a doctor because when he was married to Amy, she so overshadowed him with her talent.

And so in that scene, I think it’s a shock to her, but as she’s thinking on her feet, she says, “You know what? This is actually a perfect solution for this interim period until hopefully Amy gets on her feet and becomes the chief again.” And does he need to know? Yes, he does. And his world has also been turned upside down, not as much as Amy’s, but your wife suddenly turns around, has a car accident, and comes back and says, “I love you.” And you go, “Oh wait, we’ve been divorced for eight years.” And his marriage is falling apart. And so Joan needed to make sure that whoever takes that job keeps their eye on the ball because nothing can be more important than this job — not who you’re sleeping with, not who you have a crush on, nothing. Not all the soap opera stuff, just the job.

Chief resident, though, was a bit trickier. Something I liked was that it never felt like just because she and Amy are close, that Joan would’ve ever let that influence her decision. And I liked that it was something that was constant throughout the season. Did that feel the same way to you?

What a great observation. Yes. Building on what I just said, Joan’s ultimate aim is, as I’ve said, is to make everyone play excellently. She wants the hospital to go to the Super Bowl, so she wants everyone to bring their A game and to be excellent. And if you can’t do that, no harm, no foul, you shouldn’t be on this team. And that stringent, I would say, rule applied to Amy as well. And when Amy was chasing her memories as opposed to chasing her career, Joan was the first one to go, “Not in this hospital, you’re not. First, do no harm. Your first job when you walk in here is as a doctor.”

John Medland/Fox

It did feel like Sonya also very much earned chief resident, and we’ve seen that, especially in recent episodes. Did Joan know that that was what she had decided when Sonya came in that day, or did Sonya make her case in that room and in that last interview?

Those are questions I asked myself as I was preparing for the scene. I always think it’s more dynamic to make the decision in the scene. So I don’t think she had made that decision yet. And when the wonderful Barbie Kligman and Hank Steinberg, who are the showrunners and created this, came to me and said, at first it was Sonya was going to be the head of the chief resident. And I went, “How can that possibly be? Because at every corner, we’ve seen that Amy outperforms Sonya.”

And then when they came up with the great idea of making them co-chiefs and backed up their argument with what the chief resident needs is to be a great teacher, and a great mentor, and a wonderful colleague to bring people along with them, Sonya does have that. And the other thing that the chief resident needs is to be the star quarterback, and that is what Amy has. So it’s a wonderful combination of the character qualities that those two people have built into those roles, and they complement each other well.

And those are also two characters that need to learn to work together, and this is the perfect way to do that, to force them to work together.

Yeah. I think Sonya needs to stand up and own her power, which Amy doesn’t have a problem doing. And I think Amy needs to have compassion that comes with Sonya. So they really complement each other well. And I think by learning how to work well with each other, they will … I mean, it’s kind of like a great marriage — hopefully, you acquire what the other person’s strengths are.

Particularly interesting was Joan and Richard’s moment. How does Joan feel about him being back at Westside and remaining back at Westside as she’s leaving?

Oh, she thinks it’s a travesty, and it is a travesty. I mean, that guy, even in every piece of dialogue they give him, that guy is just out for himself. I mean, even his great acts of, “I saved this person’s life,” are all about serving himself. So he can’t be trusted. As Oprah says, if someone shows you who they are, believe them.

It also feels like she’s kind of leaving with the hope that maybe Liz might do something because of the conversation that she had with her.

I think she is because I think what Joan wants to leave in the hospital is a very functional hospital. And what that means is when people abuse their power, which is what Richard did with Liz, they’re not allowed to get away with it because people are frightened. Everyone has to be able to have a voice, the nurses included, and the young nurses included. So when you have a man, an older man who’s abusing his power, that can’t be hidden. And if it is, then the hospital won’t flourish, and Joan wants the hospital to flourish.

You said what Joan wants, but how does she feel about how she’s leaving Westside?

Well, I think she wishes she had more time. The roof isn’t quite on the house she wanted to build. I think ideally she would’ve liked to have stayed another year until Amy’s really on her feet and Amy can take over, or Amy can go on and be the superstar somewhere else that she can be, but she wants to shepherd Amy through this transition and make the hospital the best it can be. So she’s leaving a bit early, but she’s also realizing that she’s spent. She can’t do her job effectively, so she needs to put the pieces in play so that the hospital will continue to function at a high level and become what it could be, fulfill its potential.

But do you think it was a bit easier for her to leave this job than she may have thought it would be because she and her son (Connor McMahon) are now talking again, because she was able to have that? Because she didn’t seem to think that that would ever happen, and then Amy made it happen.

Yeah. God bless Amy for that. I do. I don’t think she had any place else to go. I mean, Hank and Barbie started a sentence that sort of died along the way, which was, “I go where I’m needed. I go where I’m needed.” And Joan always felt that where she was needed was her career. And her son came back into the picture and said, “No, I think you’re needed at this family, and oddly enough, you’re not needed at the hospital anymore because you can’t function at 100%.” So, had Amy not contacted her estranged son, she might have stayed on too long.

That was one of my favorite moments of the season, was him walking to the hospital in that reunion.

Oh, when he walked off the elevator, and we hugged?

Yeah, it was so good.

That’s so sweet. I’ve heard that before. I’m glad that it resonated. It was difficult to do because I met Connor five minutes before, and I mean, that’s what acting is, but I’m glad that it resonated.

I like the episode ending with Joan and Michael in her office, now his office, because it felt like that moment was needed more than another conversation with Amy at this point, because this was about Joan saying goodbye to the job, right?

Yeah, she was passing the baton unbeknownst. That’s what’s lovely about it happening in the scene is it looks like the scene is about, “OK, listen, let’s just take one of these candidates and why we’re being so recalcitrant.” And then very quickly it turns into, “Oh, you are the perfect candidate, and yes, I passed you the baton.” And how perfect. Sometimes, we’re blind to the solutions until they’re right in front of us. That was a lovely scene.

So now that Joan has kind of wrapped things up career-wise for her at this point, though, there’s the matter of her health still. What can you say about what’s coming up with Joan’s health and how worried should we be about her?

How worried to be about Joan? Well, Joan has pushed her body to the limit because she has to take prednisone or steroids to function at the level that she demands, and that’s not a free ride. They cost you physically. So, she’s pushed her body, and she realizes, “I can’t keep doing that.” She’s looking at the remaining time she has, and the clock is picking and she goes, “OK, where do I want to spend it? I have an opportunity now to spend whatever time I have left with my family. And I didn’t spend time with my son when he was growing up because I was career-driven, and now I have this extra bit of grace that I can spend with my family,” before I think this disease sort of gets the better of her.

What else is coming up with Joan?

Saying goodbye to the hospital. I think learning how to be a civilian, because she’s really just traveled her whole life with Doctors Without Borders, and going where she’s needed and stopping back at Westside and teaching for a while, and then going off. So I think she has to deal with, “OK, I’m a civilian now, and what does that look like? And can I repair with my son? Can I bond with my grandson?” And the two-hour finale that’s coming up, a virus breaks out in the hospital, and you’ll have to wait and see how Joan fits into that and we’ll see what happens.

Doc, Tuesdays, 9/8c, Fox