Before she was an actress, Minka Kelly was an operating room scrub nurse. I had no idea! When she broke out with Friday Night Lights, I unfairly assumed that acting was her first career. Minka wrote about her former career in her memoir a few years ago, but it’s just really making headlines now, thanks to a recent interview with Jimmy Kimmel (more on that later). A scrub nurse is in charge of keeping an OR sterile, monitoring a patient’s vital signs, and assisting the surgeon. It’s a pretty important job that’s not for the squeamish.
Minka is currently co-starring with Josh Duhamel on Netflix’s new modern western series, Ransom Canyon. It’s based on a book series by author Jodi Thomas. She’s done a lot of press for it over the past few weeks, and on Tuesday, she popped up on Today with Jenna & Friends (which is the same ep that Ben Affleck was on). At one point, guest co-host Andy Cohen asked Minka if there was any truth behind her previous public statements about thinking that Hollywood was “over” her. She responded that whenever she isn’t working, she always thinks that her “Lights, Camera, Action Era” is over and it’s time to go back to being a scrub nurse.
Minka Kelly is open to putting her scrubs back on if needed.
On the Tuesday, April 22, episode of Today with Jenna & Friends, the 44-year-old actress revealed to Jenna Hager Bush and guest co-host Andy Cohen that she sporadically thinks about returning to her “backup” career as an operating room scrub nurse.
“Is it true that you thought Hollywood was over you?” Cohen, 56, asked the Friday Night Lights alum.
Kelly confessed that she’s “thought that many times,” telling Cohen, who was surprised by her admission, “Of course! I’ve thought that [after] every job that finishes.”
“And then if any amount of time passes, you’re like, ‘Okay, this is it. I had a good run. And that’s okay, everything’s okay. I have my backup. I can be a scrub tech again.’ ”
She confirmed for Bush Hager, 43, that she “seriously” thinks about going back to the job “all the time.”
While Cohen and Bush Hager were both shocked, Kelly explained that “it’s a thing that gives [her] a bit of confidence.”
“You know this isn’t the whole world,” she said as she gestured to the promotional image of her new show, Ransom Canyon, seemingly referring to the entertainment industry. “So the rejection that you get being an actor is sort of balanced out for me and you can go, ‘But I’m good at this. I know I’m good at this.’ ”
“I loved it so much,” she noted. “It’s really good to feel like you’re good at something.”
That is really cool! There’s some debate online as to whether Minka was a licensed scrub nurse or a scrub technician. I searched around to get clarification, which is when I found last week’s Kimmel interview. In it, she mentions that she was “a scrub nurse, a scrub technician” and talks about going to school for it so she’d have a career to fall back on in case acting didn’t work out. She also mentions all of the different types of surgeries she’d worked on, which was “everything but open heart [surgery].” She gushed about how much she loved doing it and only stopped after landing FNL. I had no idea! It is definitely a great backup career. The story must be catching on, because Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos asked Minka about it while she was on their show as well. I bet her old coworkers, who she used to run lines with, are watching these interviews and cheering so hard.
Photos credit: Anna Kooris/Netflix, Roger Wong/INSTARimages, PGP/Backgrid
