TV Talk: ‘Good Doctor’ star Paige Spara auditioned from her family’s bathroom in Washington, Pa.

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On ABC’s “The Good Doctor” (10 p.m. Monday, WTAE-TV), Washington, Pa., native Paige Spara stars as Lea, girlfriend of Shaun (Freddie Highmore, “Bates Motel”), the show’s title character.

Spara has played Lea since midway through the first season when she appeared as a guest star. It’s 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 printer to print out the audition scene, internet service was slow and it was raining so the lighting was poor. But her “team” (agent, manager, etc.) encouraged Spara to try anyway, so she set up a Nikon camera on a tripod, copied her lines of dialogue onto six pages of paper and asked her mom, dental hygienist Kim Spara, 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 had just scoured it. My mom was like, ‘You’ve got this, hun,’ ” Spara said, chuckling at the memory. “She kept reading the stage directions — ‘Lea’s supposed to brush her hair’ — 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.”

Lea was introduced in the series as Shaun’s neighbor but as Spara’s role expanded from guest star to recurring guest star to series regular, the show’s writers brought her into the hospital, giving Lea a job in the hospital’s IT department.

“Me and Freddie, we joked in the first season, ‘I wonder if Lea can just turn into a nurse,’ we kept brainstorming ways that Lea could possibly stay on the show and have it work,” said Spara, who attended Point Park University for two years before transferring to Marymount Manhattan College, which she graduated from in 2012. “Freddie has been my No. 1 cheerleader. He’s been such a supportive friend through this whole process.”

“The Good Doctor,” which films in Vancouver, Canada, pushed toward a romance between Lea and Shaun, who is on the autism spectrum, for several seasons before finally coupling them up in the show’s current fourth season. Now Lea is pregnant, a storyline that continues in the April 26 episode.

Prior to “The Good Doctor,” Spara, 31, was a series regular on the short-lived 2015 ABC Family comedy “Kevin from Work,” which taught her about professionalism and how the set of a TV series works. Still, her confidence was shaky when she landed “The Good Doctor.”

“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 ever goes away. I literally just called Freddie the other day when I was in a furniture story, and I was like, ‘Listen, I woke up at 4 a.m. (this morning) and I’m really not sure about that 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.”

As for her audition, Spara later learned from “Good Doctor” showrunner David Shore, who was previously showrunner on Fox’s “House,” that it reminded Shore of Hugh Laurie’s audition for “House,” which Laurie taped in a hotel bathroom while on location for another project.

“That is the last thing I could ever think would have saved my (rear) in all of this,” Spara said. “I couldn’t believe that that was celebrated. That’s when I realized quickly I loved this group of people.

“We only have one bathroom in our house and we had five people in our house so we’re used to cramming into that freaking bathroom,” she said, “but it’s just really hilarious that this is what helped me transition to this new chapter in my life. It’s absolutely not glorious at all but glorious in its own way, right?”