Where Is Grey’s Anatomy Filmed, Anyway?

Much as we’d like to deny it, Grey’s Anatomy is indeed a fictional series set in the fictional Seattle Grace Mercy West Hospital. So which halls do the docs traverse as they make their rounds? Where are the ORs in which patients live and die? The answer is, as you might expect, Hollywood — or just to the east of it, in Los Feliz, at the Prospect Studios.

The Grey’s set occupies at least two sound-stages and includes most of the hospital, Joe’s bar, and the characters’ residences. A tour of the set led by James Pickens, Jr. is included on the Season 2 DVD and reveals some interesting fun facts. (For example, did you know that the MRI machine is real? Were you aware that the names on the OR schedule whiteboard are those of crew members?) However, another filming location is used for exterior shots of the hospital and scenes located in the atrium, in the Chief’s office, and on the catwalk. Those are all filmed at the Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center in North Hills. It’s a working healthcare facility with real patients and doctors, so the cast and crew can only film after 5 p.m. Sounds like it’s time to fake an ailment to try to get a glimpse of the stars…

Eric Dane Proposed to Rebecca Gayheart After She Dared Him To

Shakira may be daring listeners to kiss her in “Dare (La La La),” but Rebecca Gayheart was even bolder — she dared Grey’s Anatomy studEric Dane (Mark Sloan) to propose, as he reveals to WENN.

“We were having dinner at a restaurant, and she asked me if I ever did anything impulsive, and I said, ‘Like what? Ask someone to marry me?’ and she said, ‘Yeah, something like that,’ and I said, ‘Do you want to marry me…?,”

If this were Grey’s, that’s where the episode would cut to black, but luckily, the 41-year-old doesn’t leave us hanging.

“I was terrified, and she said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Check.’ We got the check, jumped in my car, we got the last flight out of Los Angeles to Las Vegas. We’ve been happily married ever since and we have two beautiful little girls.”

That marriage took place on October 29, 2004 — and they welcomed Billie Beatrice on March 3, 2010, and Georgia Geraldine on December 28, 2011.

“I honestly think I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be at this moment in time,” the Last Ship star recently told People. “And I’m really happy … I never had a family, and now I do. I know I’m a very lucky guy

Grey’s Anatomy Accused of Obstructing Medical Care For Veterans — Seriously?

If you’ve followed national news recently, you’ve heard about the scandal plaguing the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs — regarding reported coverups of long wait times at medical centers serving veterans.

Now, Grey’s Anatomy is being dragged into the mud, too — with The Washington Free Beaconalleging that the Grey’s production impedes care at Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center in North Hills, CA — by occupying the “entire second floor” of the facility and parking trailers in the parking lot.

As we’ve reported before, the center is where the show films scenes taking place at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital’s atrium and exterior.

One veteran says that the trailers “take up the whole parking lot.”

Bear in mind that a bit of exaggeration might be at play here. As the campus map and floor plansshow, the atrium takes up a fraction of the second floor or any floor of the center, and the facility has acres of parking lots.

Also note that and that the Beacon describes itself as an “nonprofit online newspaper” that is “dedicated to uncovering the stories that the professional left hopes will never see the light of day.”

Furthermore, a Los Angeles VA spokesman explains to the site that the production films during off-hours — and the money Grey’s pays allows the center to purchase medical equipment for veterans”

“The VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System enjoys a productive relationship with the television series Grey’s Anatomy, which periodically films in portions of our Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center during evenings, weekends, and holidays (two to four times per year), and which never impacts our ability to provide exceptional care to our veterans.”

Grey’s Anatomy Season 11: Caterina Scorsone Promoted to Series Regular

As TV Guide reports, Shonda Rhimes and ABC are promoting Caterina Scorsone to series regular for Grey’s Anatomy Season 11, meaning Derek’s sister Amelia is putting down roots in Seattle.

Caterina’s new full-time status is the first substantial news we’ve heard about Season 11, with three months or so to go before the show returns and begins its second decade on TV.

And it’s a development we predicted (and started hoping for) back in April, especially since Caterina was totally game to stay on.

“I think [Shonda is] such a remarkable woman and showrunner and creative genius,” the 32-year-old enthused to TV Fanatic at the time. “And I think if she wanted me to do one episode, I would do one episode, and if she wanted me to do 500 episodes, I’d do 500 episodes.”

‘Maiden’ is the reason Sandra Oh left ‘Grey’s Anatomy’

With its sadly timeless themes of political tyranny, the fragility of democracy and the intersection of political and personal abuse, Ariel Dorfman’s drama “Death and the Maiden” certainly feels ripe for revival. The widely acclaimed work by the Argentine-Chilean scribe was a global hit in the early 1990s, premiering at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1991, and then showing up on Broadway with Glenn Close and Richard Dreyfus. Roman Polanski made a movie version in 1994 with Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley.

In New York, if you were to attempt such a revival on Broadway today, you’d surely need a star in the central role of Paulina, long a favorite of top-tier actors and a character whose past includes torture and whose present, she fears, might well include her torturer. You’d need a name like, oh, Sandra Oh, the Canadian actress who, for a decade, has played Cristina Yang on the ABC drama “Grey’s Anatomy.”

In Chicago, though, that necessity would not apply. Although it happens from time to time, big stars don’t generally show up at the city’s nonprofit houses, which are not known for making performers rich or even offering the publicity that accompanies a nice, limited run on Broadway.

Nonetheless, Oh opens in Chay Yew’s production of “Death and the Maiden” Friday night at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago, having just quit “Grey’s Anatomy.” That was no small event in TV land. Last month, a headline on The Huffington Post read “Why Cristina Yang Leaving Grey’s Anatomy Is So Devastating.”

Oh has known Yew, the artistic director of Victory Gardens, since the two met in Los Angeles theater circles. Oh has been itching to get back into the theater. Yew, she says, convinced her that Chicago audiences are the best in the country, that they really listen in the theater, that they won’t look away or close their eyes and that they like engaging with dark, serious works like the one she is doing at the Biograph Theatre.

“You really can’t do a play between a network schedule,” Oh said over a lunch of Korean dumplings in Lincoln Park last week (a lunch she cooked). Oh was, to some degree, holed up, after injuring her foot in rehearsal, although she is continuing in the role as planned.

Oh made the decision to leave “Grey’s Anatomy” after the 10th season. It was, she said, entirely her decision, despite the medical drama offering “an unbelievable opportunity to explore 10 years of a character.”

“Imagine what that’s like for an actor,” she said. “You don’t have to imagine any back story. You don’t have to imagine, say, the time your character was unfaithful. You remember it happening. And you get to work with the same cast and crew for year after year. I was really, really happy to be a part of all that.”

So she just quit?

“I thought, well, I have to leave, because I have to go and do this play in Chicago.”

That pulled her lunch guest up short. An actress leaves a hit TV show that has been going gangbusters for a decade to do a play at a midsize Chicago theater? That’s one crazy sacrifice, you’d think, even if it seems possible that the show would have legs that stretched to Broadway (not that anybody is talking about that).

“A sacrifice? Not really,” Oh said, smiling. “Not when it’s all part of moving on. I felt 10 years was enough. And ‘Death and the Maiden’ is a very deep play. I feel a very big responsibility doing this in Chicago. If you are not completely there emotionally, it’s hard to find the beats, the glue of the character and the complexity of the work.”

Presumably Oh is not working for the same scale as her last TV gig. She laughed at that notion.

“Being able to come here and do it is part of the amazing grace of having been able to do network television for so long. I really caught the tail end of the golden age of network television. It has just become so much harder now for actors to sustain a living.”

Oh may be a TV star, but she has training and a background in live theater, mostly on the West Coast, where she has been living. She is, she says, an inveterate taker of classes, constantly studying her craft. “You know,” she said, “TV is wonderful, but it’s a medium that constantly breaks your heart. It has made me crave the process of theater. The theater uses different muscles. It is about filling your whole body.”

Cristina Yang, by the way, has left Seattle for Switzerland. If only Paulina were so lucky. But then, of course, the absence of that peace, the presence of so much pain, is what makes her so rich andchallenging to play.

Grey’s Anatomy’s Eric Dane Opens Up About His Father’s Tragic Death

Eric Dane‘s (Mark Sloan) life seems awesome at the moment — with a wife of nearly 10 years, two daughters, and a lead role on a new TNT show  — but the actor hasn’t lost sight of his past troubles, many of which he details to the Gulf Times.

One such rough patch occurred when the Grey’s Anatomy alum was seven years old — when his father tragically died

“He was a Navy man and ended up becoming an architect and interior designer. He was a troubled soul,” Eric explains. “He died of a gunshot wound. My grandmother thinks it was an accident. Everybody’s got a different opinion on it. My mother raised two kids.”

Becoming a father himself brought Eric, now 41, a new insight into the ordeal: “I never realized how cognizant and aware I was at the time until I had my own kids … I see how cogent Billie is at the age of four and think, ‘My God, this must have been devastating at the age of seven.’ The awareness that I would’ve had at that age must’ve been devastating.”

We’re sure his father would be proud of him nowadays. Eric’s new show, TNT’s The Last Ship, premieres on TNT at 9 p.m. ET on Sunday, June 22.

Sandra Oh: Grey’s Anatomy Not Dealing With Race “Bummed Me Out”

Being done with Grey’s Anatomy affords Sandra Oh (Cristina Yang) perspective — on both the highlights and the lowlights of her ten seasons on the show.

And as lovingly as the 42-year-old talks about the experience, she does have one critique, which she explains to KoreAm magazine.

“I will say, Grey’s Anatomy has never dealt with race,” she observes. “And that was up to [creator Shonda Rhimes].”

As much credit as Shonda gets (and deserves) for her color-blind casting — and for the notion that differences like skin color don’t matter at Grey Sloan Memorial — Sandra argues that we as a society are not at that post-racial ideal.

“It bummed me out because I feel like, [issues of race] could be a great story idea, or even like a joke. But [the producers] would not go for it, because it was a show choice.”

Now that she has graduated fromGrey’s, she has the freedom to tackle race with her choices in roles: “The next step for me is not about portraying how we’re the same; it’s about portraying our differences, exactly who we are,” she says.

She expresses interest in playing immigrants, even those with heavy accents or stereotypical jobs — roles that Asian-American actors might try to avoid.

“When I felt like I was trying to introduce that as a possibility for a character, a possibility as a comedic character, I think it freaked people out. Because, first, I think, it came across as racist. I’m like, ‘No, we’re just not ready for it yet. We’re not ready to actually play our own, with our familial accents, you know?”

She continues: “I feel like now I’m interested in telling the story about, you know, an aunt and uncle who opened up a dry cleaners store … It’s not regressive at all because, I think, creatively [certain immigrant stories have] never been told, not properly. That’s the shift we need to make — that the story is about ourselves.”

Grey’s Anatomy Season 11 to Be Especially “Challenging” For Meredith and Derek — Report

Shondaland can be a hostile environment for couples — even ones as committed and long-lasting as Derek (Patrick Dempsey) and Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) on Grey’s Anatomy. And TVLine‘s latest roundup of spoilers has us nervous about the show’s longest romance.

Though the site does shoot down the rumor that Grey’s creator Shonda Rhimes is killing off Meredith and having Derek hook up with Callie (Sara Ramirez), it does cite “unconfirmed buzz” that Mer and Der are “about to face one of their more challenging seasons in recent memory, which makes the timing of Cristina’s exit horrible for Mer.”

When we last saw these surgical spouses, they had reached a critical impasse. Derek had long since promised to take a step back professionally to be at home with the kids while Mer advanced her career at the hospital.

But then came the call from the President, asking Derek to join a brain-mapping initiative. Even Mer conceded that you can’t say no when the Commander in Chief rings you up, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t frustrated.

The last straw came when Der tried to relocate them to D.C. Meredith initially went along with the plan but eventually recognized that her friends were in Seattle, her research was in Seattle, her career was in Seattle, her life was in Seattle. And she declared that she wasn’t budging.

We’ve already explained why we think MerDer isn’t doomed, but we still recommend buckling your seat belts, Grey’s fans.

New Study Slams Grey’s Anatomy Over Its Depiction of Organ Donation

We love Grey’s Anatomy, but advocates of organ donation might not be so hot on the long-running medical drama. A new study criticizes the show over its organ donation storylines.

As Vox reports, a study set to be published in the July 2014 issue ofCommunication Research claims that Grey’s depicts an “overwhelmingly negative and cynical view of organ donation.”

“The majority of organ donation coverage on this program depicts doctors as vultures, eager to transplant organs from their patients,” the researchers write. “In addition, plots often highlight doctors crossing ethical lines by privileging patients that are their friends as well as affluent patients with organ transplantation over less familiar and affluent individuals.”

One episode in particular that the researchers may have cited was the Season 2 episode “Enough Is Enough” — an installment in which Derek (Patrick Dempsey) stops an organ recovery team from taking organs from a patient whom he realizes isn’t actually braindead.

The American Society of Transplantation issued a press release criticizing that particular episode: “For the producers to suggest that a surgical team would not exercise due diligence before removing an organ is highly inaccurate, undermines public confidence in the medical profession, and raises unsubstantiated concerns about organ donation.”

According to Vox, the new study found that the more respondents watched Grey’s, the more they believed the show’s medicine to be accurate, the more they developed attitudinal barriers to the idea of transplantation, and the less accurate their knowledge of transplantation became.

The report does stipulate that the decrease in accurate knowledge did not seem to affect respondents’ final opinion about becoming a donor — but it does result in other potential sticking points, like distrust in medical institutions.

Shonda Rhimes: Izzie “Probably Not Coming Back” to Grey’s Anatomy

It doesn’t surprise us that Grey’s Anatomy boss Shonda Rhimes tweeted that Izzie (Katherine Heigl) is “probably not coming back to the show,” but it does surprise us that she used the word “probably.”

A Twitter fan recently tweeted the prolific TV producer, saying that she (or he) — damn ambiguous Twitter names! — spends “way too much imagining different versions of Izzie’s return” and that Shonda “better not disappoint” her (or him).

Shonda replied, saying, “I totally won’t. Um. Because she’s probably not coming back.”

So now we know that there is a chance, no matter how slim, that Shonda would welcome back Katherine Heigl.

Until now, we had assumed that that was a lost cause, considering Katherine was vocal about “really, really, really” wanting to reprise her role as Izzie — back before she landed a full-time gig on NBC’s upcoming drama State of Affairs — and Shonda did nothing about it.

Who knows whether Shonda just didn’t see fit to continue Izzie’s storyline at the time or if she was feeling lingering resentment toward Katherine for her outspoken criticism of and abrupt exit from the show.

But hey, this is the same TV mastermind who brought Isaiah Washington (Preston Burke) back to the show, despite his behavior, so you never know what could happen.