'The Good Doctor' Paige Spara Originally Auditioned From A Bathroom With Bad Lighting

On ABC’s “The Good Doctor,” Paige Spara starred as Lea. She is the girlfriend of Shaun Murphy, who acted the role of the titular character. Spara played Lea midway through the first season when she appeared as a guest star.

According to news outlets, it was a role she almost didn’t audition for.

“I happened to be visiting my mom and dad in Washington and I had gotten the audition while I was at home and I wasn’t going to do it because it’s very strenuous to do a self-tape when you don’t have the proper equipment,” recalled Spara, a 2008 graduate of Washington High School.

She didn’t have access to a working computer or printer to print out the audition scene and her internet service was slow. Also, it was raining so her lighting was poor. But her agent encouraged her to try.

So she set up a Nikon camera on a tripod, copied her lines of dialogue onto six pages of paper, and asked her mom to read the role of Shaun, the other character in the scene.

“I had to set it up in our bathroom because it was the only room during that hour of the day that had enough light. It’s a really small bathroom and it smelled like bleach because my mom just scoured it. My mom was like, ‘You’ve got this, hun,’” she said and chuckled at the memory.

“She kept reading the stage directions and I go, ‘Mom, don’t read the stage directions, just read Shaun Murphy, that’s all.’ I do give my mom all the credit for me getting this job because of her patience that day. I appreciated my mom so much that day and even though I knew it wasn’t how it was supposed to be, I was able to be calm and collected and it helped me find who Lea was,” the star concluded.

Before the series, Spara didn’t have many acting credits. According to IMDB, she only had seven acting gigs before this one, most of them fairly small.

Her most notable role was in the short-lived 2015 ABC family comedy “Kevin from Work,” which taught her about professionalism and how the set of a TV series worked.

Spara recalled that her confidence was shaky when it was time to audition for “The Good Doctor.” Even when she landed the role, her perspective about herself still didn't change.

“Can I act? Do I even know how to do this?” she thought at the time. “I gotta be honest, I don’t think that thought ever goes away. I literally just called Freddie the other day and I was like, ‘Listen, I woke up at 4 a.m, and I’m really not sure about the take I did. I think I overdid it. What do you think?’ He will take time out of his day to not only call me back but walk me through why we made the choices we did, why it will translate, why they’re happy with it. I’m constantly in learning mode,” she concluded.

Surprisingly, Spara isn't the only star to audition from a bathroom. Hugh Laurie, the "House" star, also did, and he became the best man for the job.

He was filming somewhere when he got the call for the audition. Laurie had already made a name for himself and producers didn’t think he would be right for the role. But when he read the script, he knew he needed to get the role.

Laurie’s dad was a doctor, and he saw something special in the misanthropic Dr. House. Even though Laurie didn’t have space to make a nice audition tape, he made it work.

He filmed his audition in his hotel bathroom. Producers were floored by Laurie’s tape, despite the odd setting. They cast him and ended up making one of the most popular medical shows of all time.

The drama series follows an autistic surgeon who works at San Jose St. Bonaventure hospital and will return this Monday, September 27 on ABC.

The show was created by David Shore, who adapted it from a South Korean TV series. Shore is no stranger to long-running medical shows; he was also the creator of the Emmy-winning "House, M.D."

The cast of "The Good Doctor" also features Fiona Gubelmann, Will Yun Lee, Christina Chang, Hill Harper, Richard Schiff, Bria Henderson, Noah Galvin, and Osvaldo Benavides.

It can be streamed on Amazon Prime, Hulu, the ABC app and site, and more.

There would be one unexpected cast change in the new season. British actress Antonia Thomas, who played Dr. Claire Brown, announced she was leaving the series after four seasons.

Claire experienced a lot of growth throughout the series and believes it’s time for her to move on.

One of her biggest challenges was learning to forgive her father, Miles, who unexpectedly came back to her life. She had difficulty forgiving him because he left her and her mother when she was a child.

Claire eventually forgave her father, and they began to work on their relationship. Unfortunately, since Claire won’t be returning, we probably won’t see Miles again, either.