Katherine Heigl is candidly speaking about her controversial Grey’s Anatomy exit — and to her Grey’s co-star, Ellen Pompeo, no less!
The former co-stars, who played Dr. Izzie Stevens and Dr. Meredith grey on the long-running hit medical show, sat down with one another for a one-on-one interview for Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series. In the interview, they said “all the things we weren’t going to say.” And that included Katherine’s exit from the series.
Getting into Katherine leaving the show in 2010, she admitted:
“I would not trade anything for my 20s, but I absolutely had to idea who I was and what I wanted and who I was supposed to be and who to make happy.”
Controversy around her role on the show began during the 2008-2009 season, when she publicly announced she would not be submitting herself for Emmy consideration that year. She said at the time that she “did not feel that I was given the material this season to warrant an Emmy nomination.”
Tensions continued to heighten between Katherine and Grey’s creator Shonda Rhimes. In March 2010, they reached an agreement to release her from her contract immediately.
During the sit-down, both Katherine and Ellen discussed the show’s overnight success and how that thrust them immediately into the spotlight, leading to intense emotions on set.
Katherine shared:
“I think that gave me this confidence that was a false sense of confidence. It was rooted in something that couldn’t and maybe wouldn’t always last for me. So then I started getting real mouthy, because I did have a lot to say, and there were certain boundaries and things that I was not OK with being crossed. I didn’t know how to fight that.”
Ellen agreed, saying:
“Listen, nobody likes a super confident woman. And that’s why they’re taking away reproductive rights, and voting rights all over this country, is because they don’t want women to find their power. They don’t want women to have a voice. They don’t want women to have control because they know that we can do it better than they can.”
Katherine admitted that, looking back now, she feels that she was “so naive” back then in how she handled the whole situation:
“There was no part of me that imagined a bad reaction. I felt really justified in how I felt about it and where I was coming from. I’ve spent most of my life — I think most women do — being in that people-pleasing mode. It’s really disconcerting when you feel like you have really displeased everybody. It was not my intention to do so, but I had some things to say, and I didn’t think I was going to get such a strong reaction.”
She added that it took her almost a decade to have a fresh perspective:
“It took me until probably my mid- to late-30s to really get back to tuning out all of the noise and going, ‘But who are you? Are you this bad person? Are you ungrateful? Are you unprofessional? Are you difficult?’ Because I was confused! I thought maybe I was.
I literally believed that version, and felt such shame for such a long time, and then had to go, ‘Wait. Who am I listening to? I’m not even listening to myself. I know who I am.’”
She also said:
“I was just vibrating at way too high of a level of anxiety. For me, it’s all a bit of a blur, and it took me years to learn how to deal with that, to master it. I can’t even say that I’ve mastered it, but to even know to work on it, that anxiety and fear — and stress is stress. And if you leave stress too long, unmanaged and unaddressed, it can be debilitating.”
