Grey’s Anatomy – 12 things you didn’t know about the medical drama
Grey’s Anatomy just finished up season 16 – making it the longest-running US medical drama on TV – it’s been a ratings hit since its launch back in 2005, so no wonder we’re eagerly awaiting Grey’s Anatomy season 17 already.
Fans have avidly followed the lives of the doctors who work at fictional Seattle Grace, now renamed Grey Sloan following that plane crash.
They’ve battled cancer, watched loved ones die (Denny!), met new siblings, romanced each other in the on-call room and even survived an exploding bomb hidden in a body.
Here’s some trivia you may not know about the hit medical drama, and its attractive doctors…
It wasn’t always going to be called Grey’s Anatomy
Frank Ockenfels//ABC
According to actress Kate Walsh, who played Addison, titles including “Doctors” and “Surgeons” were considered, as well as the slightly better “Complications”, before Grey’s Anatomy (a spin on the medical text book ‘Gray’s Anatomy’) was chosen.
McDreamy was nearly played by a different actor
Numerous actors read for the part of McDreamy – otherwise known as Dr Derek Shepherd – before Patrick Dempsey won the role.
“We brought in a lot of guys [for Shepard],” Rhimes said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune in 2005.
“Derek was really not an easy role to cast. You had to believe he was intelligent, so you can believe he’s a brain surgeon. And while you’re watching, you’d be like: ‘I wish my boyfriend looked like that!’ But he had to be rugged, not pretty. Handsome, sexy, but not in an obvious way, sexy in a smart way.”
Among those rumoured to have considered for the role of McDreamy? West Wing star Rob Lowe – who revealed in his biography that he turned the role down and took the lead in ‘Dr Vegas’ instead (oops) – and Isaiah Washington, who went on to be cast as surgeon Preston Burke.
And Sandra Oh almost wasn’t Christina
ABC
It’s hard to imagine that anyone but Killing Eve‘s Sandra Oh could have played Meredith’s tough, dedicated friend Christina Yang, but as Oh told an audience at the PaleyFest in LA in 2006, she was actually asked to audition for a completely different part.
“I first auditioned for the part of Miranda Bailey,” she said. “And thank god I did not get that part. Can you imagine not having her [Chandra Wilson, who does play Bailey]?”
“At that time I was practising asking for what I wanted in my life. I saw the part of Christina, and I wanted to do that part, and so even though producers… wanted me to come in for the part of Bailey, I said ‘No, I want to come in for Christina.'”
The show was always meant to be the complete opposite of ER
ER, the hit medical drama that launched George Clooney’s career, was still on air when creator Shonda Rhimes came up with the idea for Grey’s Anatomy.
ER was known for being fast-paced and frantic, whereas Rhimes wanted her series to be more about the relationships than the medicine.
“ER is high speed medicine. The camera flies around, adrenaline is rushing,” she told Oprah Magazine in 2006. “My show is more personal.”
“The idea for the series began when a doctor told me it was incredibly hard to shave her legs in the hospital shower. At first, that seemed like a silly detail. But then I thought about the fact that it was the only time and place this woman might have to shave her legs. That’s how hard the work is.”
You could have bought Derek and Meredith a wedding present
In 2009, when Meredith and McDreamy finally decided to get married, a real life wedding registry for the couple was created on the website The Knot.
Instead of buying the Shepherds’ matching dinnerware or a set of saucepans, however, fans could donate via the registry to research organisations including the Alzheimers Association.
Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington directed one of the show’s grittiest episodes
Washington – who directed the Academy Award-nominated movie Fences – helmed the season 12 episode ‘The Sound Of Silence’, in which Meredith is brutally attacked by a patient at Grey Sloan hospital and left unable to hear.
“Executive producer Debbie Allen kept teasing weeks before: ‘I have a surprise for you!'” Ellen Pompeo told Entertainment Weekly’s Lynette Rice in September 2018.
“I didn’t know what it was going to be. And then when she told me that Denzel was coming to direct, I obviously had a heart attack. I was probably a complete idiot when I met him.”
“Denzel was so refreshing. He’s someone who wants us to know all the answers. He doesn’t want you to show up to set asking a million questions. That was pretty much a whole episode with no dialogue, which was amazing and so fun. I’m as decisive and opinionated as they come, so I was fully prepared. I had to bring my A-game for him, so I did.”
Ellen Pompeo did her own stunt – after her stunt double was injured
In the tense 2006 episode ‘As We Know It’, Meredith surgically removed a bomb that was hidden inside a man’s chest and handed it over to bomb defusal expert Dylan (Kyle Chandler) – only for the bomb to explode.
The explosion propels poor Meredith across the room, and the scene was planned with Pompeo’s stunt double being pulled on a cable. Unfortunately, as producer Peter Horton told Entertainment Weekly, the stunt didn’t go as planned.
“She got yanked, having landed on her back and getting her head snapped back. And boy, did it. You could hear it. As stunt people do, she immediately sat up and said ‘I’m fine.’ But clearly she had whacked her head hard… so I had Ellen do it.”
Pompeo has said she didn’t want to do it – after all, a professional stuntwoman had just been injured trying the stunt – but she eventually completed the stunt.
“We pulled her [Ellen] much slower than we pulled the stunt double,” Horton promises.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan didn’t want Denny to die, either
Before he was Negan in The Walking Dead, Jeffrey Dean Morgan broke our hearts as adorable critical patient Denny in season two and three of Grey’s.
In a 2006 interview with the LA Times, Morgan confessed that he begged producer Shona Rhimes to save Denny, but he couldn’t convince her.
So, after surviving a heart transplant and asking Dr Izzie Stevens (Katherine Heigl) to marry him, poor old Denny suffered a stroke and breathed his last.
“I had no idea what it would be like. How attached I would get. It was the only time in my career when I didn’t mind getting up at 5.30 in the morning, didn’t mind the 16-hour days.”
It’s gross to act out the operating theatre scenes
To make the surgical scenes look as realistic as possible, the actors work with real flesh – though thankfully it isn’t human.
Sarah Drew, who played Dr April Kepner for eight seasons, revealed to the Miami Herald in 2010 that the cast “work with bovine organs, which is cow’s organs. The smell is repulsive and makes us all gag. And we use an actual soldering tool to solder the organs. It smells like burning flesh. There’s also a lot of silicone and blood matter, red jello mixed with blood and chicken fat. It’s pretty gross.”
Grey’s Anatomy has saved lives in the real world, too
There have been a series of reports in US newspapers of members of the public saving lives using practices they first saw on the show.
In 2011, when 36-year-old Kandace Seyferth suffered a severe asthma attack, her 10-year-old daughter Madisyn and friend Katelynn called 911 and administered CPR that they had seen on Grey’s Anatomy, saving Kandace’s life.
And in 2017 it was reported that another woman performed cardiac massage on her husband when he collapsed until an ambulance arrived – a technique she remembered seeing in the series.
There’s a third Grey’s spin-off you probably missed
Two hit series have spun off from Grey’s Anatomy. Firstly Private Practice, which followed McDreamy’s ex, Addison (Kate Walsh) to LA and the ongoing Station 19, which focuses on the Seattle fire station where Miranda Bailey’s husband Ben Warren (Jason George) works.
But in 2018 there was a third spin-off, Grey’s Anatomy: B-Team, which consisted of six three-minute episodes that streamed on ABC.com. The web series focused on the new interns at the hospital and was directed by former Grey’s actress Sarah Drew.
Starring Jake Borelli (who plays Levi), Sophia Ali (Dahlia Qadri), Rushi Kota (Vik) and Alex Blue Davis (Casey), it also featured guest appearances from Grey’s regulars Chandra Wilson, Justin Chambers, Kelly McCreary, Kevin McKidd and James Pickens Jr.
And there was a Grey’s Anatomy video game (and it was pretty terrible)
Yes, you don’t have to just imagine what it is like to be Meredith – thanks to Ubisoft Games, you could be her in the Grey’s Anatomy official video game.
Released in 2009, the game allows you to play as one of the main characters and decide what to do when a crisis unfolds at the hospital.
None of the show’s stars provided the voices for characters, such as Derek Shepard, George O’Malley, Meredith, Christina and Izzy, which is disappointing and the game itself is really dull – but you sometimes get the chance to cut into patients’ brains, which you’d usually need a medical degree for.