Katherine Heigl's Reunion With 'Grey's Anatomy' Cast Comes 16 Years After Her Emmys Drama

Katherine Heigl reunion with her former Grey’s Anatomy cast at the Primetime Emmys on Monday is a pretty big deal. When the actress left the show in 2010, she had already been branded with a “difficult” label because of her outspokenness on the set of the hit show. That reputation has been hard for her to shake even though she’s proven time and again that she’s a serious TV all-star.

At the height of her fame, Heigl won an Emmy in 2007 for her beloved role as Izzie Stevens in the supporting actress category. It was the following year that the drama started and her feud with Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes began. Heigl decided not to submit herself for a nomination because “wasn’t feeling good” about the work she did that season which put the blame squarely on the writers of the show. “There was a part of me that thought, because I had won the year before, that I needed juicy, dramatic, emotional material, and I just didn’t have that that season,” she told Howard Stern in a 2016 interview, via People.

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She honestly “didn’t think anybody would notice” that she was missing from the Emmy ranks that year and was “really embarrassed” when the story became a scandal. “I went into Shonda and said, ‘I’m so sorry, that wasn’t cool; I should not have said that,'” Heigl recalled. “I didn’t think that journalists would see who submitted and who didn’t. I just quietly didn’t submit. And then it became a story, and then I felt I was obligated to make my statement.”

That’s when everyone began describing Heigl as “difficult” which followed her from job to job even if she didn’t really earn that title at all. Former costar Ellen Pompeo defended Heigl years later, noting that she was “ahead of her time” about calling out some of the working conditions on the set. “I remember Heigl said something on a talk show about the insane hours we were working, and she was 100 percent right,” Pompeo said on the Tell Me podcast. “And had she said that today, she’d be a complete hero.”

Instead, the situation became, “‘Let’s slam a woman and call her ungrateful,'” said Pompeo. “When the truth is, she’s 100 percent honest, and it’s absolutely correct what she said.” So, perhaps the Grey’s Anatomy reunion will be cathartic for everyone, but most of all for Heigl, who never deserved the “difficult” label in the first place.

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