EXCLUSIVE: Former Saturday Night Live writer/performer John Higgins, member of the Please Don’t Destroy comedy group, has joined the cast of ABC’s Scrubs for a major recurring role in the upcoming second season of the revival.

He will play Grant, the new Chief Resident, who is envisioned as a thorn in J.D.’s side the way he himself once was for Dr. Cox.

Donald Faison alluded to the casting at D23’s “Scrubs: Scrubbing Back” panel Saturday moderated by Scott Foley — who is returning to the show next season as Sean Kelly — and featuring series stars/executive producers Braff (John “J.D.” Dorian), Faison (Christopher Turk) and Sarah Chalke (Elliot Reid), along with showrunner/executive producer Aseem Batra.

“John Higgins joins the cast, it’s been a lot of fun to watch him work, actually him and Ava Bunn, who plays Tosh. They’ve been great additions,” Faison said.

Nearly a year after they first appeared onscreen together in Regretting You, Mason Thames and McKenna Grace are playing romantic opposites again.

Following Colleen Hoover romance’s premiere last October, Thames recently revealed he had already worked with Grace on the Green Day-inspired movie Nimrods, which is now playing in theaters.

“So we did Green Day first. Green Day movie first, and then we did Regretting You right after,” he explained to People. “But it was just so wild. The coincidence of two back-to-back is awesome and we love it.”

Thames added, “I’m so happy that we can finally release it to everybody, because it’s felt like my little secret and my little experience, but I really hope people go to see it and feel the love that was used to make this movie, because I’m really happy with it.”

After playing romantic opposites twice now, the real-life couple is open to working together again. “If we were ever going to do another job together, we’d want it to be so special and so awesome, so whenever that moment arises, we’re going to snatch it up,” said Thames.

In Nimrods, Tommy (Thames) receives a call inviting him and his band Analog Dogs to open for Green Day on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles. Not realizing it’s his older brother Wayne (Keen Ruffalo) pulling an elaborate prank, Tommy steals Wayne’s car and sets off on a cross-country roadtrip from Kansas City with his bandmates Fred (Kylr Coffman) and Chad (Ryan Foust).

Along the way, Tommy meets fellow punk Olivia (Grace) and strikes up a flirtation after seeing her perform live. Both Thames and Grace appear on the movie’s soundtrack.

“I mean, those kids are fantastic. They can do anything,” raved co-writer/director Lee Kirk to Deadline. “And they’re the nicest kids, creative kids, very eager. They were up for whatever we wanted to do. I was so lucky that McKenna wanted to do it and she wanted to put her song in the movie. I just felt like it gave it some authenticity to it, and Mason with his singing, he rehearsed, he worked on those songs, which were written by Billie Joe [Armstrong’s] son, by the way. Yeah, Jakob wrote those songs for the Analog Dogs.”

Rob Rausch, a handsome snake-wrangler from Alabama, was standing a few feet away from Maura Higgins, the former Love Islander, next to the Traitors’ roundtable. Showing little emotion, he finally revealed that he had double-crossed her to win more than $220,000.

“I was so fooled by you, you absolute *sshole, you pinky promised,” Higgins says in the Peacock finale. “You’re never going to have a girlfriend after this; you’re such a good liar.”

Higgins and the majority of the cast had been fooled all along.

“I wish I could sit here and say I knew he was a traitor, but I had no clue,” Higgins said at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees Studio. “He played the best game in that castle. I genuinely did believe he was a faithful, but you know what? It’s a game, and I was fine with it. I went through all the emotions very quickly, and then I was like, ‘You know what? Fair play.’ I genuinely was so convinced that me and him was winning the show together.”

Higgins was joined by Rausch and fellow Season 4 contestants Monét X Change, Tara Lipinski, Lisa Rinna, Rob Cesternino and Eric Nam for the Deadline conversation. Watch the discussion below, and scroll down for photos from the event.

Rausch was cold as ice. “I was actually surprised in the edit. I feel like they made me seem a little more nervous than I was,” he said.

Rausch, who also became famous on the U.S. version of Love Island, did make it up to Higgins, somewhat, by buying her a Hermès Birkin bag.

Rinna, a fellow traitor and the person who helped Rausch secure the bag, had similarly been crossed by him, twice. “I just didn’t see that coming, so I was really genuinely shocked by that because I thought he was a better boy than that, but he wasn’t,” she said. “Everyone wanted him to be Mr. America, and no one wanted to believe that he could possibly be a traitor.”

It was a dynamite finale for the Studio Lambert-produced show, which scored six Emmy nominations this year including for Outstanding Reality Competition Program, after winning that category the past two seasons.

In addition to those on the Deadline panel, the series starred Ian Terry, Porsha Williams, Donna Kelce, Caroline Stanbury, Tiffany Mitchell, Michael Rapaport, Ron Funches, Yamil ‘Yam Yam’ Arocho, Colton Underwood, Candiace Dillard Bassett, Dorinda Medley, Stephen Colletti, Kristen Kish, Natalie Anderson, Mark Ballas, Johnny Weir and Eric Nam.

Tara Lipinski and Maura Higgins

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

Rob Rausch

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

Lisa Rinna

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

Monét X Change

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

Eric Nam

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

Rob Cesternino

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

Nam, who became a traitor after being recruited halfway through the show, was also crossed by Rausch in the finale. “Rob was like ‘We’re going to win this together’ and I was like ‘Cool.’”

The singer-songwriter said it was difficult pivoting from being a faithful to becoming a traitor. “Emotionally, it was exhausting,” he said. “We had quickly become friends. I went to bed one night and three hours later, you have to go decide who to kill and that was such a stressful experience.”

One moment not shown on screen was when the whole group was going down the stairs: Nam shouted “Traitor,” and Rinna turned her head. She was subsequently banished in episode 7. But she was fine with that.

“I had no strategy whatsoever, but the plan that I had was I wanted to wear that Erik Charlotte Couture dress to the banquet, and I didn’t know when the banquet was because they tell you nothing. I was just holding out for that, and so once they got me after that, I was fine because in my mind I had won,” she said.

Monét X Change, a faithful murdered in episode 5, said that he had tried to send Higgins “messages from the grave” but she didn’t hear him.

Cesternino, a former Survivor star, was murdered in episode 3. He said that The Traitors is more “mentally taxing” than the CBS competition series.

Lipinski, an Olympic figure skater, made it to the end but couldn’t convince Higgins or Nam that Rausch was a traitor.

“He plays it so cool, at all times,” she said. “You’re constantly surveying everyone, and you just don’t pick up any type of energy of [whether] he even wants to be there. He just did a great job.”