There were no doubt as many intrigues in the screenplay of Grey’s Anatomy than on the film set since the inception of the series. If everything happened in the best of worlds during the first seasons, things started to go wrong in 2008. At the time, Katherine Heigl, rewarded the year before at the Emmy Awards for her role as Izzie Stevens, refused to compete again. The reason ? She felt that her scenes were not worth such an honor: “I didn’t really like my performance in the season released in 2008, she explains. (…) That year I said: ‘I won’t submit what I’ve shot, I can’t find anything in it that makes me proud’. (…) I had the feeling that, since I had won the year before, I absolutely had to show strong, dramatic and emotional scenes, and I did not have any during this season.“. These public remarks hurt Shonda Rhimes, the creator of Grey’s Anatomywhose sentence was not long in coming: at the end of season 6, Katherine Heigl was fired and Ellen Pompeo (Meredith Grey) was in no hurry to catch up with her.
The 52-year-old actress explained that she preferred to stay away from the existing quarrels between the comedians. At the time, Isaiah Washington (Preston Burke) was also ousted for having made homophobic remarks against TR Knight (George O’Malley). A harmful environment from which Ellen Pompeo wanted to keep her distance: “As I watched the uproar with Isaiah, and then everything going on around Katie, I focused on work. Maybe that’s my very blue-collar Boston upbringing. I just tried not to pay attention to everything that was going on around me“. Some time before, Katherine Heigl had referred to her colleagues as “simple working relationships“Even though she had invited them to her baby shower in addition to having been portrayed as execrable and greedy in terms of salary. We understand better why Ellen Pompeo did not struggle to take her side.
Despite Katherine Heigl’s not very nice statements, Ellen Pompeo however took a step towards her in 2020. Publicly attacked by Isaiah Washington on social networks, Katherine Heigl had received the discreet support of her ex-colleague. The interpreter of Meredith Gray had published a gif of the series on Twitter, in which the characters of Izzie and Meredith appear more complicit and smiling than ever. Relations therefore seem to have softened, but perhaps not to the point of sharing the same scalpel again…