Not every Grey’s Anatomy exit is created equally. Katherine Heigl, Patrick Dempsey, Justin Chambers and more stars have left Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital — for various reasons.
Created by Shonda Rhimes and starring Ellen Pompeo, Grey’s Anatomy debuted on ABC in 2005. Pompeo (Meredith Grey) left the show as a series regular following season 19 but continued to provide voiceover narration and make special guest appearances in later seasons.
“I’m going to always be a part of that show,” Pompeo told Deadline in 2022. “I’m an executive producer. I spent two decades of my career on [Grey’s Anatomy] — it’s my heart and soul. I’ll never truly be gone as long as [it’s] on the air.”
Rhimes left ABC in 2017, handing the showrunner reins over to Krista Vernoff.
“On every show I’ve ever worked on, there are stories you wish you could have told differently, but they were derailed by a behind-the-scenes issue. And that’s the thing that fans don’t understand,” Vernoff, who worked on seasons 1-7 of Grey’s before returning for season 14, told the Los Angeles Times in November 2020. “There was probably some s—t happening behind the scenes that we had to stay up all night rewriting scripts to try to have any semblance of a story to tell.’”
But why did some of our Grey’s Anatomy favorites leave Grey Sloan Memorial in the first place? Scroll through a breakdown of the reasons behind the show’s biggest exits:
