Six years after first stepping into Grey Sloan Memorial, Chris Carmack got into a groove on the Grey’s Anatomy set.
Carmack joined Grey’s Anatomy in 2015 as a potential love interest for Ellen Pompeo’s Meredith Grey. When the relationship didn’t last, he wasn’t sure what was next for his character, Link.
“I had no idea what the future on the show was going to be,” Carmack, 44, said on the Monday, March 24, episode of the “Call It What It Is” podcast. “I’ll say this, too. You say, ‘Did I immediately feel like it was the right place for me?’ The answer is like, no way. Because this show has been on for so long. For so long. And the characters that I’ve been working with have been on the show for so long. After I’d been on the show for six years, I remember turning to Kevin McKidd and saying, ‘I finally don’t feel like the new guy.’ It takes so long on a show like this to not feel like the new guy.”
Carmack clarified that his feelings weren’t because anyone made him feel “uncomfortable,” but that everything had been “so established.”
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Cohost Jessica Capshaw recalled experiencing similar emotions when she entered the show as Arizona Robbins in season 5, years before Carmack came on board.
“Because the show was such a huge hit and because it was actually sort of famous for having had some rocky behind-the-scenes action — like there was so much stuff happening, which I think is kind of typical of something that’s that successful — I remember coming in and there was such a — I don’t think it’s there anymore — but there was like a tier system,” Capshaw, 48, alleged. “There was a hierarchy to who had been there, how long they’d been there, how comfortable they were or weren’t.”
She continued, “I mean, these were people who on some level, again, because of just how successful the show was and how much was being thrown at them, that kind of, I don’t know why everyone makes the analogy to war, but they’d kind of been to war and they’d navigated all these things and then I came after that, so I too was new to that. And I completely agree with you. I did not feel firmly in place until many years into it. It was always the people who were there from the beginning and then it was the new people that came in.”
Cohost Camilla Luddington — who joined the show as Dr. Jo Wilson in 2012 — noted that she also “felt the hierarchy,” but she didn’t think it exists now. Carmack, for his part, said he “wouldn’t personally describe” his experience as a “hierarchy.”
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“Something happens too, as an actor on a show, when you’ve been on it for years, you know, your backstory and your relationships with all the other characters and actors becomes so ingrained and second nature, it actually, your work gets better. Your work gets more mature. You don’t have to do a lot of the work because, you know, I don’t have to build these characters in my mind,” he said. “I don’t have to do the acting work. I’ve known them for seven years and I know their characters and I know everything we’ve been through together. We’ve actually acted those scenes together.”
Carmack gushed that coming onto a show like Grey’s Anatomy, he was “blown away” by the actors that were around him. “I said, ‘Oh, my God, they’re so good. Everybody is so talented,’” he said. “And it’s true.”
