Paging Dr. Nostalgia.
Katherine Heigl and Jeffrey Dean Morgan recently reunited virtually to celebrate 20 years of Shondaland and playing Izzie Stevens and Denny Duquette on “Grey’s Anatomy.”
In the second season of the Shonda Rhimes-created hit medical drama, Izzie, a resident, begins a relationship with a patient, Denny, who later dies in a heartbreaking sequence.
“I can’t rewatch it,” Morgan, 58, admitted of his character’s ending in the Season 2 finale, which aired in May 2006. “It makes me cry. One, because it was so awesome, and two, it was f–king incredibly sad to watch.”
He added, “I don’t see myself in there, which I take is a good sign, if I can watch myself acting and not see myself. And I never did, working with Heigl and having Shonda’s words. That’s pretty special.”
“I remember that scene when Denny died, how stressed out I was to perform that and just wanting to give it my absolute best and really try not to chew the scenery and try not to make it overly melodramatic, but to really hit that grief honestly,” Heigl, 46, recalled. “I put all this pressure on myself to do that well. I was sitting alone a lot, listening to really sad music, thinking about my dead brother, which was fun.”
“I didn’t have to do anything, obviously. I was dead,” Morgan quipped.
“But I remember having so much empathy for what you were going through because it was rough,” he continued. “And you had to sit there and cry, and they wanted to shoot it 900 different ways to Sunday. So you cried for a good 15 hours that day.”
Despite the pain of filming, Morgan confessed, “It’s one of my favorite scenes. You were so good.”
Heigl echoed her co-star’s sentiments, gushing, “You were so good. You made it very easy to do.”
“One of my favorite things about Shonda as a writer is how beautifully she does these tortured love stories. And I feel like that was Denny and Izzie, it was doomed from the start,” she said. “And being able to do that, you have to have some camaraderie, some connection, some affection and respect for the person you’re working with. In this instance, it was magic. It just worked.”
“Because it did happen so fast, we did meet on set, we did dive right into that storyline. It wasn’t like I had some big lead-up to, ‘This is coming for Izzie.’ It’s always secretive there and they don’t want to spill the beans too soon. So you’re finding out as it’s going.”
In honor of the 20-year anniversary of Rhimes’ production company, the creator, 55, detailed two potential spinoffs of “Grey’s” and her other hit ABC show “Scandal.”
“Grey’s Anatomy” successfully launched the 2007 spinoff “Private Practice” and 2018’s “Station 19,” but there were other show ideas that didn’t make it to air.
“On ‘Grey’s,’ there were a bunch,” Rhimes told Entertainment Weekly. “I felt like we could have done ‘Chicago Anatomy,’ ‘Boston.’ We could have done that. It just didn’t appeal to me to rebuild the same world. And then we thought about a lot of things.”
One of those ideas involved the Shepherd family — which included the late Derek Shepherd’s (Patrick Dempsey) sisters: Amelia (Caterina Scorsone), Nancy (Embeth Davidtz), Kathleen (Amy Acker) and Liz (Neve Campbell).
“I thought that there could be a spinoff with Amelia that was the Shepherd sisters,” the writer confessed. “They’re all doctors. It could have been a Shepherd sisters show, which would’ve been very interesting.”
Another spinoff that never came to fruition was in the land of “Scandal,” which followed the life of Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), a fixer mixed up with the president.
“We wanted to do a B613 spinoff on ‘Scandal,'” Rhimes told the outlet of the show’s nefarious government agency, first run by Rowan Pope (Joe Morton).
“There was a bunch,” Rhimes said about the spinoff discussions she had. “But we really tried to look for shows that could stand on their own two feet, that were their own thing. If you spin off a character, what people want is more of the same. They’re like, ‘Oh, I’m going to get another show where Addison’s [Kate Walsh] the mistress.’ Instinctively you want more of the same, because that really worked. And to build a new world is incredibly difficult.”
“Grey’s Anatomy” is currently in its 21st season. “Scandal” ran from 2012 to 2018.
