Not every Grey’s Anatomy go out is created equally. Katherine Heigl, Patrick Dempsey, Justin Chambers and more stars have left Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital — for various reasons.

Created via Shonda Rhimes and starring Ellen Pompeo, Grey’s Anatomy debuted on ABC in 2005. While the actress who plays Meredith Grey has admitted that she’s nearly walked away in the past, Pompeo is one in all the only unique cast participants still on the sequence as of season 17. Chandra Wilson (Miranda Bailey) and James Pickens Jr. (Richard Webber) are the simplest other two OGs closing.

Even Rhimes left ABC in 2017, handing the reins over to Krista Vernoff to take over as showrunner.

“On each show I’ve ever worked on, there are tales you wish it's good to have instructed differently, but they have been derailed via a behind-the-scenes factor. And that’s the factor that fans don’t understand,” Vernoff, who worked on seasons 1-7 of Grey’s before returning for season 14, informed the Los Angeles Times in November 2020. “So, when you’re responding to fan outcries, you can cross crazy because you need to tell them: ‘If some couple broke up in point of fact all at once in the center of what used to be a in reality exceedingly beautiful arc, that more than likely wasn’t what the writers wanted! There was more than likely some s—t going down behind the scenes that we needed to stay up all evening rewriting scripts to try to have any semblance of a story to tell.’ That’s why writers have producer titles in tv because you’re not spending two years writing a script and then that’s a super script and then you’re delivery it up for other people to shoot. There are personalities involved.”

Vernoff cited Heigl’s unprecedented exit during the middle of season 6 for example.

“There was a solution to Izzie’s story. We had deliberate to have her come back for an episode to in reality correctly tie up Izzie and Alex (Chambers). And I wrote that episode, and it used to be gorgeous. The day prior to it was supposed to start prepping or capturing, I will be able to’t take into account, we got a decision that Katie wasn’t coming. Just wasn’t coming. Wasn’t going to do it,” the author said. “It was my job to stick up all night for a couple of nights and reimagine a script that didn’t come with Izzie. And for years and years and years and years and years, the enthusiasts scream at us, ‘How may just you?’ Well, that’s the behind-the-scenes tale. That’s what came about. I’m now not pronouncing that to bash Katie. I don’t know what was going down in her life.”

Sources as regards to Heigel, alternatively, tell Us that “Vernoff is improper” on the subject of the actress’ exit from the sequence. “Katherine was once again in L.A. after parental go away (when she followed her daughter) ready to be called to set,” the resources mentioned.

While Heigl has yet to go back since her departure in 2010, Dempsey made headlines in November 2020 when his character, who died all through season 11, made an expected appearance in the season 17 premiere.

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“Patrick and Ellen and I were all there at the starting of this; I wasn’t there for the pilot, however I used to be there for the first seven seasons, and that used to be 17 years ago,” Vernoff informed Deadline at the time. “That was once, like, a life-time ago; my children weren’t alive. It was so wild to walk out on that seashore, and just be in combination again as these other folks that we are actually. But I will’t overstate how happy and healing an enjoy this used to be.”

But why did Dempsey leave Grey’s Anatomy in the first place? Scroll through a breakdown of the reasons behind the display’s biggest exits:

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