Patrick Dempsey's Grey's Anatomy exit involved "HR issues": "He sort of was terrorizing the set"

The Hollywood Reporter

Entertainment Weekly editor-at-large Lynette Rice conducted more than 80 interviews for her oral history book How to Save a Life: The Inside Story of Grey’s Anatomy, which will be released on Tuesday and which is being excerpted in The Hollywood Reporter. The book details alleged "HR issues" involving Dempsey, accusing the McDreamy actor of having "diva-like fits" amid tension with co-star Ellen Pompeo. It all came to head in Season 11 when executive producer James D. Parriott was brought back to serve as a "veritable Dempsey whisperer." "Shonda needed an OG to come in as sort of a showrunner for fourteen episodes," says Parriott. "There were HR issues. It wasn’t sexual in any way. He sort of was terrorizing the set. Some cast members had all sorts of PTSD with him. He had this hold on the set where he knew he could stop production and scare people. The network and studio came down and we had sessions with them. I think he was just done with the show. He didn’t like the inconvenience of coming in every day and working. He and Shonda were at each other’s throats." Co-executive producer Jeannine Renshaw adds: "I think Shonda finally witnessed it herself, and that was the final straw. Shonda had to say to the network, 'If he doesn’t go, I go.' Nobody wanted him to leave, because he was the show. Him and Ellen. Patrick is a sweetheart. It messes you up, this business." For his part, Dempsey says of his behavior on set: "It’s ten months, fifteen hours a day. You never know your schedule, so your kid asks you, 'What are you doing on Monday?' And you go, 'I don’t know,' because I don’t know my schedule. Doing that for eleven years is challenging. But you have to be grateful, because you’re well compensated, so you can’t really complain because you don’t really have a right. You don’t have control over your schedule. So, you have to just be flexible." Dempsey adds of learning of his exit: "I don’t remember the date (I got the news). It was not in the fall. Maybe February or March. It was just a natural progression. And the way everything was unfolding in a very organic way, it was like, 'Okay! This is obviously the right time.' Things happened very quickly. We were like, “Oh, this is where it’s going to go.”