A Grey's Anatomy star has revealed that one bizarre storyline in which a woman had sex with a ghost was probably the show's most "polarizing" scene.
Kevin McKidd plays Dr. Owen Hunt in the long-running ABC hospital drama and spoke about the show with his cast mate, Kim Raver, who stars at Dr. Teddy Altman. One question put to them during the chat for Entertainment Tonight was which storyline did McKidd think was "over the top."
The pair discussed some of their own scenes, when McKidd referenced a Season 5 storyline that has often been dubbed one of the show's most controversial. It featured Katherine Heigl's character, Dr Izzie Stevens, having sex with a ghost, including performing oral sex on him.
The ghost was of her former partner, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Izzie was not actually sleeping with a ghost, but rather suffering hallucinations, as a result of a stage IV metastatic melanoma, which had metastasized to her liver, brain and skin.
"I remember when I first joined Season 5, that's when the Izzie storyline was happening. That was very polarizing... so anything can happen in the show," he said.
Heigl spoke about filming those controversial scenes in a 2023 discussion with lead Grey's Anatomy actress Ellen Pompeo. She revealed she found some of her Grey's Anatomy scenes uncomfortable with her teenage daughter, Naleigh.
"I feel like there would be scenes that I would be so embarrassed to be sitting next to [my daughter] watching. There's a few that I'd be like, 'Maybe we fast-forward through this moment'," Heigl said, to which Pompeo replied: "The sex with the ghost."
"The oral sex with the ghost while somebody else was watching in the room. I don't know how I'd explain that," Heigl agreed, during their chat for an episode of Variety's Actors on Actors.
Elsewhere in McKidd's chat with Raver, they spoke about some of the show's other "over the top" episodes and they both agreed it was one they appeared in together.
In the Season 18 episode called "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," the pair are involved in a car accident while retrieving a heart for transplant surgery. But their driver passed out, likely from a stroke, and the car crashed rolling down a ditch, just inches from a steep cliff.
"We are in this car that is like a rotisserie chicken that turns you upside down, and it's supposed to go fast," Raver said. "When we were doing it, we were super strapped in and everything was safe, and we're spinning around and it stops and we're hanging upside down."
McKidd agreed, adding they looked like "upside down" bats and Raver said, "that was definitely the craziest [storyline] to shoot."
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Shannon Power is a Greek-Australian reporter, but now calls London home. They have worked as across three continents in print, ... Read more