Chyler Leigh is looking back at some of her more memorable moments on Grey’s Anatomy, including her character’s shocking death and why she felt “ridiculous” filming her brief return to the long-running medical drama in 2021.
On the most recent episode of fellow Grey’s stars Jessica Capshaw and Camilla Luddington’s Call It What It Is podcast, Leigh, who also stars on The Way Home, recalled initial backlash to her character, Dr. Lexie Grey, when she was first introduced at the end of the show’s third season.
“When I first came on the show, the very first episode, which then led into the second episode, I was hitting on [Patrick Dempsey’s] McDreamy at the bar after a funeral,” Leigh said. “I was like ‘McSlutty.’ Everybody – they hated me.”
“They’re like, ‘Oh my gosh….she’s a homewrecker trying to get in between, you know, Meredith and Derek.’ ” Leigh recalled. “And, and then the next episode was, ‘I’m Lexie. I’m your sister.’ And everybody’s like, ‘Woah!’ ”
Leigh ultimately played Lexie, the half-sister of Ellen Pompeo’s Meredith Grey, for four more seasons, until the character died in a plane crash that left several of the show’s characters fighting for survival in the wilderness at the end of season 8. In a subsequent season 9 episode, Sandra Oh’s Cristina Yang struggles with the harrowing memory of hearing wolves fighting over Lexie’s body in the night while she and the other doctors were stranded.
On Call It What It Is, Leigh, Capshaw and Luddington struggled to remember whether that much-memed scene actually happened.
“I guess I was eaten by wolves?” Leigh joked. “I just wanna know because, like, wolves [are] like, one of my spirit animals, so I’m like, I’m down with that.”
Despite her character’s gruesome demise, Leigh said she still feels that “it was the right moment” for her to leave the show. “When I had the conversation with [series creator Shonda Rhimes] about leaving, we were just trying to figure out a really great way for it to happen and for Lexie to go,” she recalled.
Leigh added that she doesn’t regret her character dying and said she felt she got “redemption” in a 2021 episode. The season 17 episode was part of a multi-episode storyline that found Meredith dreaming of Lexie and other deceased Grey’s characters while suffering from COVID-19. As Leigh noted, the episodes were shot during the actual COVID-19 pandemic, making her guest appearance a challenge.
“I was filming Supergirl in Vancouver,” she explained. “And it was legit COVID. And so, we had started filming on the show again, but no one could leave Canada.”
“It was really tough because I was filming nonstop, like, every day, but then the issue was if I went across the border and then came back, I would have to quarantine for two weeks,” she continued. “So everything that I filmed was on my own, in a totally different sound stage with, like, the blue screen behind me. So, I’m pushing Meredith on — like, an invisible Meredith, and I never felt so ridiculous in my whole life.”
“And granted,” Leigh added, “I was working on a superhero show. So, I was like, you already can feel pretty ridiculous. This was right up there.”
Of course, Leigh recalled other ridiculous moments from her run on Grey’s. “Twas not my favorite,” she said of a season 5 storyline in which Eric Dane’s Mark Sloan suffers a penile fracture after a night with Lexie. “I remember having to read at the table read. I had no idea it was coming,” she said. “I remember shrinking in my chair and the script going up in front of my face. It was mortifying. Absolutely mortifying.”
Leigh said she also didn’t appreciate how the show’s writers explained away the weight she gained during her 2009 pregnancy. “I was pregnant, we had to explain why Lexie was gaining weight, so we all of a sudden made the storyline that she ate every time she got stressed,” Leigh recalled. “That was a little rough, but I understood. I got it. But I had to eat 17 Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in a scene.”