Over a decade after Katherine Heigl butted heads with the executives at ABC and the behind-the-scenes creative team on Grey's Anatomy, series star Ellen Pompeo has spoken out in her defense. The medical drama began its residency on the televisions of millions of viewers' homes in 2005 as a mid-season replacement for Boston Legal, quickly becoming a hit with critics and viewers alike. Almost 400 episodes and 18 seasons later, Grey's is showing few signs of dimming in popularity with season 19 already ordered.
Heigl began as a series regular alongside Pompeo, playing Izzie Stevens, a medical intern at Seattle Grace Hospital. Her troubles seemingly began around 2008 when she made several critical statements about work she'd appeared in, including Grey's. She withdrew her name from Emmy consideration, stating she hadn’t been given enough material on the series to warrant a nomination. Although she tried to clarify those remarks and apologize to series creator Shonda Rhimes, friction remained between them, and she was deemed a "difficult" actress in the court of public opinion. After a dramatic arc in season 5 where Izzie battled cancer and had a brain tumor removed, she returned to work at the hospital, only to be fired for giving a patient the wrong dosage of medicine. Her appearances were sporadic after that, and in season 6 Izzie was written off the show to start a new life.
While Pompeo didn't speak on the Emmys drama, she praised some other concerns Heigl had raised at the time in a recent episode of her podcast Tell Me With Ellen Pompeo (reported on via Deadline). Talking to fellow Grey's alum Kate Walsh, Pompeo called Heigl "ahead of her time" for a 2009 interview Heigl had with David Letterman. In the interview, the actor called out the consistent 17-hour workdays the cast and crew had to work on the show as "mean" and "cruel." The full quote from Pompeo is below:
"I remember Heigl said something on a talk show about the insane hours we were working. She was 100 percent right. Had she said that today, she’d be a complete hero. But she [was] ahead of her time. She made a statement about our crazy hours, and of course, let’s slam a woman and call her ungrateful. When the truth is, she’s 100 percent honest and it’s absolutely correct what she said, and she was f*cking ballsy for saying it, and she was telling the truth, she wasn’t lying."
While she was one of the medical drama's breakout stars, Heigl's career took a hit for speaking her mind, and even the normally even-keeled Diane Sawyer criticized her in a one-on-one interview between the two. Despite her career slowing, she hasn't completely disappeared from film and TV altogether and she's remained as vocal as ever. Last year she spoke out on social media in defense of IATSE (the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees), a labor organization that covers over 150,000 workers and tradespeople working behind the scenes in entertainment, during their strike to raise their minimum wages and increase their off-hours between shifts. Heigl nailed it in her defense, saying of IATSE's strike, "We are not solving world hunger or curing cancer. We are telling stories. When production plows into hour 14 and beyond they are asking our crews to drive themselves home bone tired."
It may have been a decade ago, but this reappraisal of Heigl is important. In an era where so many men have been accused of sexual assault and have continued on with their careers with only a slap on the wrist, or in some cases such as Ansel Elgort's, not even that, Heigl's "difficult" persona comes across more as "an opinionated woman who's not afraid to speak her mind." A veteran of the screen for over 30 years, and a champion of people not working to the point of exhaustion, she seems to have been punished far more for speaking up than her male contemporaries are for being physically and mentally abusive. Grey's Anatomy may have written her off long ago, but Pompeo is right: perhaps the rest of the public was too quick to do the same.
Source: Deadline