GREY’S ON SET TOXIC CULTURE

THE TOXIC WORK CULTURE AND BULLYING ON THE SET OF THE HIT DRAMA IS BEING EXPOSED IN A BOOK

With 18 seasons of heartbreaking moments, there isn’t much the medical staff at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital haven’t seen, including a shooting, a plane crash and a patient with a bomb inside them. But now a new book by Lynette Rice, How to Save a Life: The Inside Story of Grey’s Anatomy, reveals the on-screen scandals of the hit drama pale in comparison to the real-life theatrics that took place once the cameras were switched off.

Since their initial boozy encounter in a bar during the first episode of Grey’s Anatomy, the chemistry between Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) and Derrick Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) lit the screen on fire. While fans mourned when the brain surgeon was killed off in a car crash in 2015, many of the cast and crew were reportedly breathing a sigh of relief that Dempsey, 55, wouldn’t be returning.

“There were HR issues. It wasn’t sexual in any way,” the program’s executive producer James D Parriott said in an extract of the book, which ran in The Hollywood Reporter. “[Dempsey] sort of was terrorising the set. Some cast members had all sorts of PTSD with him. He had this hold on the set where he knew he could stop production and scare people,” he explained.

Dempsey revealed to WHO’s sister publication People magazine in 2016 that he’d decided to leave so he could spend more time with his family and explore other opportunities. “It was time for me to move on with other things,” he said.

But Parriott further claimed that the man behind “McDreamy” didn’t actually leave on his own accord, but was given the boot when he clashed with series creator Shonda Rhimes. “The network and studio came down and we had sessions with them. I think he was just done with the show,” Parriott said. “He and Shonda were at each other’s throats.”

Rhimes has previously indicated at tensions on the set, confessing she’d killed a character off the show because “she didn’t like the actor” while appearing on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore in 2015. “I’m not naming names,” she hinted. The book further reveals there was no love lost between Dempsey and his leading lady after he was dumped. Former executive producer Jeannine Renshaw claimed Pompeo got frustrated with her on-screen love interest for not “working as much” as she did. “She just didn’t like that Patrick would complain that ‘I’m here too late’ or ‘I’ve been here too long’ when she had twice as many scenes in the episode as he did,” Renshaw said.

Pompeo, 51, admits she and Dempsey were often pitted against each other. “They could always use him as leverage against me – ‘We don’t need you; we have Patrick’ – which they did for years,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “I’m not going to let a guy drive me out of my own house,” she added.

“[Dempsey] sort of was terrorising the set” PARRIOTT

The hit drama premiered in 2005 and is still airing today, though many of its original cast members have left. “The first 10 years we had serious culture issues, very bad behaviour, really toxic work environment,” Pompeo said.

“We haven’t spoken since he left the show,” Pompeo said of Dempsey three years after he was killed off.

“You only get killed off when your behaviour is bad. If you’re a nice actor, you die nice,” Pompeo explained. Page Six reported that Rhimes “suspended” Dempsey from the show in the months leading up to his on-screen death.