Katherine Heigl Talks About Her ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Exit With Ellen Pompeo

Katherine Heigl admits she was “so naive” when it comes to the scandal surrounding her contentious exit from Grey’s Anatomy. The actress, who exited the medical drama in 2010 amid tensions with show creator Shonda Rhimes, spoke candidly with former co-star Ellen Pompeo during their new one-on-one interview for Variety’s Actors on Actors series.

The Firefly Lane actress, who played Dr. Izzie Stevens opposite Pompeo’s Dr. Meredith Grey on the long-running ABC show, said of her exit, “I would not trade anything for my 20s, but I absolutely had no idea who I was and what I wanted and who I was supposed to be and who to make happy.” Heigl first came under fire after she publicly refused to submit herself for Emmy consideration, saying she did not feel she was “given the material this season to warrant an Emmy nomination.” As tensions worsened on set, Heigl and Rhimes agreed to immediately release her from her contract, and the actress left the show amid the drama. 

Heigl and Pompeo agreed the massive and sudden success of Grey’s Anatomy was difficult to navigate. “I think that gave me this confidence that was a false sense of confidence,” Heigl recalled. “It was rooted in something that couldn’t and maybe wouldn’t always last for me. So then I started getting real mouthy, because I did have a lot to say, and there were certain boundaries and things that I was not OK with being crossed. I didn’t know how to fight that.”

“Listen, nobody likes a super confident woman,” Pompeo assured her. “And that’s why they’re taking away reproductive rights, and voting rights all over this country, is because they don’t want women to find their power. They don’t want women to have a voice. They don’t want women to have control because they know that we can do it better than they can.”

Heigl admitted that in hindsight, she was “so naive” in her handling of the situation, as there was “no part” of her that expected a negative reaction. “I felt really justified in how I felt about it and where I was coming from. I’ve spent most of my life – I think most women do – being in that people-pleasing mode,” she explained. “It’s really disconcerting when you feel like you have really displeased everybody. It was not my intention to do so, but I had some things to say, and I didn’t think I was going to get such a strong reaction.”

A decade later, Heigl said she was able to truly understand what had happened. “It took me until probably my mid- to late-30s to really get back to tuning out all of the noise and going, ‘But who are you? Are you this bad person? Are you ungrateful? Are you unprofessional? Are you difficult?’ Because I was confused! I thought maybe I was,” she revealed. “I literally believed that version, and felt such shame for such a long time, and then had to go, ‘Wait. Who am I listening to? I’m not even listening to myself. I know who I am.’”

“I was just vibrating at way too high of a level of anxiety,” Heigl added. “For me, it’s all a bit of a blur, and it took me years to learn how to deal with that, to master it. I can’t even say that I’ve mastered it, but to even know to work on it, that anxiety and fear – and stress is stress. And if you leave stress too long, unmanaged and unaddressed, it can be debilitating.”