It turns out that it wasn’t just Grey’s Anatomy viewers who despised the awkward sex scene between Meredith and George; the actors hated it, too!
On Mar. 16, Ellen Pompeo, known for her starring role as Meredith Grey on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy, appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast, hosted by Alex Cooper. The episode is the latest stop on Pompeo’s press tour for her new Hulu drama series, Good American Family—a show about a family who adopts an 8-year-old girl with a rare form of dwarfism, only to soon question everything they thought they knew about the girl’s identity.
During the episode, Pompeo dishes on everything Grey’s Anatomy, revealing her hot takes on some of Meredith’s biggest dating disasters, including the infamous moment when Meredith sleeps with her friend, George O’Malley (T.R. Knight), in Season 2, despite knowing that he liked her for years.
“Can I tell you an inside story about that?” Pompeo asks Cooper, who responds with a “please,” gesturing her to go on.
“T.R. and I are such good friends,” Pompeo said. “And we had to do a love scene, and we were both crying. We cried.”
In the show, the sex scene comes at one of the most vulnerable points of Meredith’s emotional arc during the season. She just broke up with her neurosurgeon boyfriend, Derek Shepard (Patrick Dempsey), and then she had a disastrous encounter with her estranged father, leading the character to seek comfort in the arms of her good friend, George.
Meredith regrets the decision almost immediately, bursting into tears in the middle of sex.
“The scene was so uncomfortable and awkward. He didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do it,” Pompeo recalled.
In fact, the scene was so bad for the actors to film that the network ended up not being very happy with it, claiming there was too much “thrusting” going on, so the actors had to re-shoot the scene.
“[It was my] worst nightmare to have to do it one time,” Pompeo said. “We had to re-shoot that s***. We had to re-shoot it and do it twice.”
Remember how Meredith bursts into tears during the scene?
Yeah, well, apparently those were real tears. According to Pompeo, she hated filming the scene so much that she still has yet to see it.
“By the way, I’ve never watched that scene,” Pompeo confessed. “I’ve never seen it, but I don’t know how it was shot or covered or… how it was edited. But I’m full-on in tears, the whole entire scene. And those are real tears.”
If it’s any comfort to Pompeo, Grey’s Anatomy fans were probably all crying with her, watching in horror as the two characters put one of the show’s most beloved friendship’s at risk.
