If not for Shonda Rhimes’ casting-room intervention, Gray’s Anatomy would have regarded very completely different — particularly, a lot whiter. The Gray’s creator says she needed to insist that her ABC medical drama solid actors of coloration in a dialog with the community’s president on the time.
Within the new HBO documentary Seen & Heard: The Historical past of Black Tv, Rhimes shares how she did “one thing individuals didn’t do,” in that she selected to not write any character’s race into the Gray’s pilot script. So she was dismayed when she was offered solely with white actors to solid.
“I saved saying, like, ‘The place are all of the actors?’ They’d maintain sending us these actors who all look the identical, who had been white,” she says. “I keep in mind standing up within the room and turning round and searching on the president of the community on the time and saying, ‘I’m not going to have an all-white present.’”
In response to Rhimes, everybody within the room was “actually startled” and denied that that was the intention. “And so [casting director] Linda Lowy went out to the brokers and mentioned, ‘Pay attention, we wish to see everyone.’ And this flood of actors began to come back in. And it was actually great. We bought to see all these actors who had by no means been thought-about for roles aside from, like, in very small components earlier than.”
Scott Garfield/Everett Assortment
She added: “I simply knew that I used to be not going to make a present that I’d’ve been embarrassed to placed on TV,” she mentioned. “I wasn’t going to make a present [for which] I must flip to my dad and mom and go, ‘Yeah, it has an all-white solid, however that’s how TV’s made.’ Like, How was I going to say that to my dad?”
Rhimes has been candid about tensions with former ABC president Stephen McPherson and different community brass throughout the early days of Gray’s. After a disagreement over a scene within the present’s second episode, ABC execs confronted Rhimes within the enhancing room and demanded modifications, as she informed The Hollywood Reporter in 2014.
“I keep in mind sitting there pondering to myself, ‘How a lot change can I make in order that I nonetheless really feel like I’m doing my present but additionally will get them the hell out of my enhancing room and [ensures] this by no means occurs once more?’” she mentioned.
Then got here an argument with McPherson across the time Rhimes turned within the fourth or fifth episode. “He mentioned actually horrible issues to me,” she mentioned. “I actually began preserving a listing of what number of occasions he mentioned a sure swear phrase to me. After that, I used to be like, ‘OK, we’re lifeless.’”
After all, Gray’s was removed from lifeless — the present’s twenty second season premieres this fall.
Gray’s Anatomy, Season 22 Premiere, October 9, 10/9c, ABC