How a wayward youth led him to a Grey’s Anatomy gig
Giacomo Gianniotti reflects on what got him on a major TV hit and where he’s going from here
Giacomo Gianniotti just finished his 50th episode acting in one of TV’s most durable hits, Grey’s Anatomy — a heady position for a young Canadian actor. He’s inclined to thank marijuana for getting him to this stage in life.
“I guess I’m really happy for pot,” the actor says, smiling, during a Skype chat. “Because if I hadn’t smoked it . . . I wouldn’t have gone to Toronto and stepped into the me that I was meant to be.”
Gianniotti, 27, has been a regular on Grey’s, now in its 13th season, playing Dr. Andrew DeLuca since 2015. You may have caught him on the big screen in last year’s Stephen Hopkins film Race; he’s also enjoyed stints on shows including Reign, Selfie and Murdoch Mysteries.
And it all began, he supposes, in Grade 9 in Parry Sound, Ont., when he was caught smoking marijuana.
He was kicked out of school and moved to Toronto to live with his dad, where he attended Cardinal Carter Academy for the Arts.
In high school, he recalls, he would break into the Kraft Canada headquarters parking lot in North York with his buddies.
“We’d have coffee and cigarettes and just talk,” Gianniotti says. “(There) was this beautiful view of the Don Valley Parkway.”
Sometime after Cardinal Carter, he enrolled in Humber College’s theatre program, during which time he set up shop with some pals in Parkdale in a “horrible apartment with cockroaches.” It was a far cry from his childhood back in Parry Sound (“everybody left their doors open, you shared food with your neighbours,” he recalls), but Toronto is where his acting career began.
Before long, though, he was looking south. Grey’s Anatomy was in its early years when Gianniotti was in high school. The girls at his school watched, but he’d never seen it. “Fast forward, a bunch of years later . . . I sent a tape out for this Grey’s Anatomy character.”
Four months went by and he hadn’t heard back. Gianniotti had begun to feel frustrated with the small pool of acting options in Toronto and he decided to move to Los Angeles.
Driving across America with two Toronto friends who were helping him relocate, he got a call from his agent, telling him that Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes — a huge figure in the TV industry — wanted to meet with him when he arrived in L.A.
The three men were in Albuquerque, N.M., and Gianniotti told his friends to take over driving for the rest of the way. In the back of the car he studied his script. When he arrived in L.A., he met with Rhimes and her team — a few days later, he had the part.
Joining the show was at first “overwhelming.”
“It was a lot of people, a lot of personalities . . . it’s hard to get quiet,” Gianniotti says.
And quiet is important for the actor, who calls himself “really shy and really introverted.” He uses his headphones to block out some of the noise on set and he has guitars in his trailer, which he plays to unwind.
But he’s found a kindred spirit in actor Martin Henderson, who plays Ellen Pompeo’s new love interest, cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Nathan Riggs.
“He’s from New Zealand and I’m from Canada, and we’ve just drawn a lot of parallels of being mountain men and liking the outdoors,” Gianniotti says of his offset friend.
Getting used to new environments is nothing novel to the blue-eyed Italian-Canadian, who was born in Rome to an Italian father and a Canadian mother and moved to this country when he was around 5 years old. But he had a lot to learn, it emerged, about one of the staples of his new job: simulating surgery.
“There’s just so much protocol in the OR,” he says, recalling that one medical producer was especially exasperated with him that first day.
“She’s like, ‘If a doctor saw you, they would be like, faker!’ ” he says with a laugh. “And we don’t want that, so my first surgery — every two seconds, she was like ‘Cut! Giacomo! What are you — your hands are — no! — oh my God!’ ”
“It was a little bit of a learning curve and (the other actors were) laughing at me,” he chuckles. “Because they had all been there themselves and were remembering it.”
His character was most recently at the centre of a dramatic, violent encounter with Alex Karev (Justin Chambers), which almost sent the latter (a fan-favourite character) to jail. Gianniotti is excited for fans to see the season finale, which he describes as “huge and wild and bigbudget,” but laments that “there’s just so many amazing things (about it) and I cannot tell you any of them.”
The eventfulness of the deathless Grey’s is probably one key to its success; the show gained teen viewers last year while staying in the top 10 among TV watchers aged 18 to 34 for the sixth year running, according to ABC. Gianniotti can’t comment yet on whether he’ll be back on the show next season; his own contract is managed yearly and he hasn’t received it yet.
How has his life been changed by the gig?
“I didn’t have much growing up. I’m so grateful for what I have now and it’s kind of ridiculous, to be honest,” he admits.
But the actor — often talking with his hands during the interview or absent-mindedly stroking his beard — doesn’t see the point in spending money on material effects.
“I don’t buy fancy things . . . I have, like, three pairs of jeans,” he says.
But he can make a difference for those who are struggling; his platform allows him to call out to fans and quickly raise money for the causes he believes in.
Recently he’s put a lot of his heart
“He’s from New Zealand and I’m from Canada, and we’ve just drawn a lot of parallels of being mountain men and liking the outdoors.” GIACOMO GIANNIOTTI ON GREY’S CO-STAR AND FRIEND MARTIN HENDERSON
into working with an L.A. charity for homeless youth called My Friend’s Place.
“It’s such a massive problem. Literally everywhere you look (in Los Angeles you see a homeless person) . . . and it’s usually a kid.”
He misses Toronto — for example, snow, the lakeshore and getting macaroons and coffee at Queen St. W.’s Nadège. In fact, he returned to town in April to direct a music video for those friends who helped him move to L.A. years ago.
He’s also started his own production company and recently wrote a song, which he tells fans to expect in the next couple of months. He has broader ambitions for his acting career, too, declaring he’s “dying, dying, dying to explore war films.”
Until that offer arrives, I ask him how he has time for it all. “Not a lot of sleep,” he quips. Grey’s Anatomy’s Season 13 finale airs Thursday, May 18 at 7 p.m. on CTV.