Katherine Heigl has revealed she has never watched Grey’s Anatomy with her children as she’s worried they’ll ridicule her for some of the show’s more bizarre scenes.
The actor, 46, who played Izzie Stevens from seasons one to six of the medical drama, has three children; daughters Naleigh, 15, Adalaide, 12, and a son Joshua, eight, who she shares with her husband Josh Kelley.
Despite Grey’s Anatomy celebrating its 20th anniversary this week, Heigl admitted she still cringes at a ghostly sex scene she filmed with her co-star Jeffrey Dean Morgan in season five of the show.
“We have not watched Grey’s. Partly because I was like, ‘How do I explain that [to my children]?’” she told Entertainment Weekly the moment from the 2005 episode “In the Midnight Hour”.
“I’m like, ‘You can watch it, but I don’t want to sit next to you. I will be so embarrassed,’” Hiegl said in reference to her eldest daughter.
“She will make me embarrassed. She will make fun of me,” the actor explained. “It’s better not to give her that ammunition. Do you know what I’m saying?”
Heigl said she saw the ghost sex scene, which saw her character consummate her relationship with Morgan’s ghost as “wish fulfillment” for Izzie and Denny to finally “get to be together”.
The star added that filming the scenes was “awkward” because of the concept that Izzie couldn’t actually see Denny during the intimate moment.
“She could never acknowledge me,” Morgan said. “I remember I was yelling at her while everybody else was giving her doctor information. And it was throwing everybody off.”
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Heigel added: “There’s one particular scene that I will not watch with my children ever. I don’t care how old they are. I don’t care if they’re 60, I’m not watching this with them.
“And it was a scene where you’re in the room, but I’m trying to be like, ‘You are not here, you’re not here.’ And Alex [Justin Chambers] and Izzie start messing around and he goes down on her. And you’re just standing there. And I was just sort of at the time like, ‘This is what the money’s for, right?’”
Morgan reflected: “She’s messing around with a dead guy. But it was fun. We did have fun. There was a lot of laughing, I’ll tell you that.”
