Camilla Luddington has revealed that previously, she and her Grey’s Anatomy cast members weren’t allowed to read their script ahead of the table read, which she found “terrifying.”
The actor joined the cast of the long-running ABC series as Dr. Josephine “Jo” Wilson in 2012. The show first aired in 2005 and is now in its 21st season.
Luddington shared her thoughts on the unwritten script rule during an episode of the Call It What It Is podcast she hosts with her friend and former Grey’s Anatomy actor Jessica Capshaw. Capshaw played pediatric surgeon Arizona Robbins until March 2018, having starred in 11 seasons.
The guest for the episode published on December 9 was former cast member Chyler Leigh, who played Lexie Grey. During the conversation, she explained that you wouldn’t find out if you’d been killed off until the table read.
Newsweek emailed Shondaland, the television production that products Grey’s Anatomy, for comment on Tuesday outside of normal business hours.
“The scripts, you didn’t read them until you got to the table, so everything was cold, so we had no idea what was happening. And some people would just be like, killed off and you’d find that out [at the table read],” Leigh said.
Luddington responded: “It has changed now, now we get them ahead of time, but when I started this was the same. It was terrifying; and when I started I remember there being a rule where you couldn’t even like, sit with your script and quickly go through and look for your stuff. To me, I was told that was a no-no, that I couldn’t even flip through.”
The women joked that they would want to read the script ahead of time to find out whether they had been killed off.
Capshaw added that if you were raising young children, you wouldn’t mind if you appeared less in an episode.
“We were like, equally thrilled to have the work and also maybe not have the work, right? When you were working you loved your storylines, you were so excited, but also if you weren’t in the script so much you were like, ‘This could be great! I could sleep and that would be good,'” she explained.
Elsewhere in the episode, Luddington revealed that she and other Grey’s Anatomy cast members were “traumatized” by a plane crash storyline from Season 8 of the hit show which took place in the final two episodes.
The aircraft was carrying six of the show’s doctors to assist with the surgery of conjoined twins at a hospital in Boise. In a dramatic turn of events, it crashed after suffering a mechanical failure. Both Lexie and Mark Sloane (Eric Dane) died as a result of the traumatic incident.
“When I started the show, I heard that, um, because you had just left, right? We don’t like to talk about the plane crash episode because everyone’s traumatized,” Luddington told Leigh.
“But I came on after and I thought, ‘This is a crazy way to come on because we’re losing such iconic characters from the show, this is a little bit scary.’ And everybody talked about how truly incredible you were as a cast member.
“And we’re talking about like—crew always know, crew on TV shows, your reputation really sits with the crew because they see you every day. Not every actor sees you every day but the cameraman does, the makeup artist. Everyone could not say [….] they were just like, in love with you, and so sad you were leaving.”
The plane crash episodes and the episodes that showcased the aftermath have gone down in television history.
In the first episode of Season 9, Mark died from his injuries, and his life support was turned off. Cristina Yang, played by Sandra Oh, was haunted by the memory of hearing wolves fighting over Lexie’s dead body. Each survivor handled the repercussions differently, which allowed the show to examine trauma in a way it hadn’t done before.
Even though Leigh recognizes how iconic the two episodes are, it’s had an everlasting effect on her.
“I watched it when it aired and then I never watched it again,” Leigh said and when she was asked whether it was traumatic to watch, she added: “It was super traumatic to film it and then to go back through it, I was like, ‘OK, I’m good.'”