Do you remember that awkward Ellen Pompeo and T.R. Knight sex scene from season two of Grey’s Anatomy? Yeah, it was apparently even more uncomfortable to film that scene than it was to watch. In fact, according to Pompeo, the experience was so awful it brought both her and Knight to literal tears. I really think the doctors on Grey’s Anatomy and the actors who played them could spend hours swapping workplace horror stories.
In a Call Her Daddy interview, Pompeo said, “T.R. and I are such good friends and we had to do a love scene, and we were both crying.” In the show, Meredith (Pompeo) and George (Knight) spend one disastrous night together after Meredith has a tough breakup with Derek and George confesses his feelings for her.
Pompeo explained on the podcast, “He didn’t want to do that, I didn’t want to do it. When we filmed it, it was so bad, and then the network said there was too much thrusting.” Which meant Pompeo and Knight had to go through the whole nightmare a second time. “In your worst nightmare, to have to do it one time—we had to reshoot that shit. We had to reshoot it and do it twice.”
While Pompeo stayed on Grey’s Anatomy for 19 seasons, Knight left the show after season five, due to what he called a “breakdown of communication” between himself and showrunner Shonda Rhimes in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “My five-year experience proved to me that I could not trust any answer that was given [about George].” Additionally, one of the show’s stars, Isaiah Washington, was fired after he reportedly referred to Knight, who is gay, as the F-slur (which Washington denied).
The good news is that Ellen Pompeo and T.R. Knight have remained good friends, even if Pompeo has never been able to bring herself to watch that scene. “I’ve never seen it. 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,” she said.