Spoiler alert! This story contains major spoilers for the Grey’s Anatomy Season 22 premiere, which you can stream with a Hulu subscription if you’re not caught up.
After leaving viewers on a brutal cliffhanger earlier this year, Grey’s Anatomy finally revealed which doctor didn’t survive the hospital explosion when Season 22 premiered on the 2025 TV schedule. Fans were forced to say goodbye to Monica Beltran, after a surgical light fell on top of her, crushing her pelvis. Natalie Morales revealed how she learned of her character’s demise, and she joked that she hopes the surviving doctors are “miserable” without her.
Natalie Morales was a recurring cast member on Grey’s Anatomy for Seasons 20 and 21, with Monica growing close to Winston Ndugu and Amelia Shepherd (Anthony Hill and Caterina Scorsone, respectively). She also served as a mentor to Jules Millin (Adelaide Kane) particularly in “Only the Strong Survive,” and it’s obvious that Monica’s death is going to be hard for them to overcome. That seems just fine to Morales, who joked to THR:
I hope they’re miserable. I hope they go crazy and they can’t live with themselves. I hope that they talk about Monica for seasons to come. I hope that I haunt them and I can come back and do some weird episodes as a ghost. That’s what I hope. (Laughs.)
It seems that the actress is taking her character’s death just fine, because obviously she doesn’t wish all that hardship on Jules and Amelia (who honestly have been through so much already). In fact, she seemed kind of proud to join the ranks of Grey-Sloan doctors to bite the dust and even campaigned to get a plaque that reads, “I DIED ON GREY’S ANATOMY.”
It also might help that her death wasn’t completely unexpected. Natalie Morales recalled getting the news from showrunner Meg Marinis, saying:
At the end of last season, none of us knew who was going to make it or not. But I was like, ‘It’s probably me [who dies]. I’m the newest one. I’m not a series regular. There’s a lot of people in that cast.’ Then they called me and asked me to be in this season and to do this episode. And when Meg called me, I was like, ‘Oh, I thought I for sure I was going to be the one you were going to kill off.’ And she was like, ‘Well …’ (Laughs.) So that’s how I found out.
That sounds like a bit of an awkward conversation, to be sure, but at least Natalie Morales wasn’t completely blindsided. It makes sense that she saw her time on the show coming to an end, especially considering its large cast and the fact they were already reducing episode counts for series regulars amid budget cuts.
For the rest of us, though, Monica Beltran’s death was a bit of a shock, as we’d been led to believe in that Season 21 finale cliffhanger that it was Atticus Lincoln (Chris Carmack’s Link) who was given the shaft — as Carmack himself joked about in a recreation of a famous Friends scene. Link did pull through — just barely, though! — and he’s likely looking at a long road to recovery.
We’ll get to see what that looks like, as well as just how miserable Amelia and Monica’s other former colleagues are when Grey’s Anatomy returns at 10 p.m. ET Thursday, October 16, on ABC and streaming the next day on Hulu.