Ellen Pompeo didn’t pick, choose or love this sex scene. The Grey’s Anatomy star, who has played protagonist Dr Meredith Grey since its 2005 debut, recently reflected on the one sex scene that makes her cringe to this day: When Meredith slept with TR Knight’s George O’Malley.
“TR and I are such good friends,” Ellen explained to Alex Cooper on a March 19 episode of Call Her Daddy. “And we had to do a love scene and we were both crying. We cried.” Indeed, in the episode-which takes place during the latter half of season two-Meredith spontaneously decides to sleep with George while she is heartbroken over Patrick Dempsey’s Derek AKA McDreamy. While the pair have sex, Meredith breaks down in tears, leaving her friend to storm out of the room.
“The scene was so uncomfortable and awkward and he didn’t wanna do that,” she continued. “I didn’t wanna do it. And when we filmed it, it was so bad.”
Sadly, the experience didn’t end there. As Ellen noted, “The network said there was too much thrusting. In your worst nightmare to have to do it one time, we had to re-shoot that s–t. We had to re-shoot it and do it twice.”
One silver lining, however, is that nearly 20 years later, Ellen still hasn’t watched the scene. “I’ve never seen it,” she acknowledged, “but I don’t know how it was shot or covered or what the end, how it was edited, but I’m full on in tears, the whole entire scene. And those are real tears.”
Of course, there are more things about her character’s early arc that Ellen finds difficult to reflect on. When it comes to Meredith’s iconic confession of her feelings to Derek-who is, at the time, trying to make things work with his wife, Kate Walsh’s Addison Montgomery-in the scrub room, Ellen had one thing to say: “Girl, bye.”