The verdict is in: the Ghost Denny era of Grey’s Anatomy was awkward and “confusing for everyone.” Just ask Katherine Heigl and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
“It’s funny because I don’t remember much of that season because it just… I don’t know that anybody thought that was working when we were doing it,” Morgan, 58, told Entertainment Weekly in a joint interview with his former co-star published on Friday, March 28.
Heigl added that she was sure plenty of fans got “wish fulfillment” out of the plot, but conceded that it was “awkward.”
“I imagine that it was to give the fans a bit of this wish fulfillment, but yeah, it was awkward — not the scenes, but the concept,” she said.
“She could never acknowledge me,” Morgan explained of how Heigl’s character, Izzie Stephens, interacted with Denny after he died on the show. “And I remember I was yelling at her while everybody else was giving her doctor information. And it was throwing everybody off.”
Heigl also admitted that there is one scene in particular between the two actors that she never wants to see again.
“There’s one particular scene that I will not watch with my children ever. I don’t care how old they are. I don’t care if they’re 60, I’m not watching this with them,” she explained. “And it was a scene where you’re in the room, but I’m trying to be like, ‘You are not here, you’re not here.’ And Alex [Justin Chambers] and Izzie start messing around and he goes down on her. And you’re just standing there. And I was just sort of at the time like, ‘This is what the money’s for, right?’”
The “Ghost Denny” episodes were a major part of the show’s fifth season. Heigl’s character, who unknowingly had a brain tumor at the time, began to see hallucinations of her former fiancé, played by Morgan.
Despite the awkward nature of filming the scenes, Morgan added that he was pleased to be back on the show after his character’s death in the season 2 finale.
“But it was great to be back, I’ll say that,” he explained. “The work is always great. It’s like Katie said, I don’t know that the story stuck. It was a hard one for the viewers because it was so kind of out of the realm of Grey’s Anatomy. And I think by the time we… It started airing while we were still shooting the story, and we knew that the audience reaction wasn’t that excited about, ‘What? She’s seeing a dead guy? What the f— is going on?’”
Heigl felt the same way. “For me, I loved Izzie and I wanted her to get to have that with Denny. And so there was part of me that loved it and wanted to do it, and wanted to see her have that, even if it was just a fantasy,” she explained. “But yeah, because there was this supernatural aspect of it, like you’re saying, it wasn’t necessarily in the realm of Grey’s Anatomy.”
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