Almost 20 years later, Katherine Heigl still has to explain that Grey’s Anatomy Emmys scandal

In the early 2000s, Katherine Heigl developed that most dreaded reputation for any female actor—she was “difficult.” This narrative sprung up around a few high-profile events: a difficult contract negotiation with ABC; describing her own movie, Knocked Up, as “a little sexist”; calling out Grey’s Anatomy for its “cruel and mean” working schedule; and pulling herself out of contention for the 2008 Emmys. Heigl has spent much of her career addressing one or the other of those controversies, but it’s the Emmys issue that came up most recently on Shannen Doherty’s Let’s Be Clear podcast (via Entertainment Weekly), when Doherty observed, “I don’t know any person except for you that turns down an Emmy nomination.”

“Well, I didn’t, and everybody keeps saying that. I didn’t turn it down. You know, you have to submit yourself,” Heigl corrected. “You have to submit your work, and then they deliberate and then they decide if they want to give you a nomination. I just didn’t submit my work that year.”

At the time, Heigl’s absence from the Emmy race was notable because she was the only Grey’s star to actually take home a trophy. She won an Emmy in 2007 for her performance as Izzie Stevens in the show’s third season, which saw her character recovering from the death of her fiancé, returning to medicine, and ultimately donating bone marrow to the daughter she gave up for adoption as a teenager. That was juicy stuff! By contrast, most of the fourth season Izzie’s storyline centered around her unpopular and ill-fated romance with George (T.R. Knight). When Gold Derby noticed that Heigl hadn’t submitted herself for Emmy contention, Heigl released a frank statement saying, “I do not feel I was given the material this season to warrant a nomination.”

Obviously, that didn’t sit well with industry insiders or, y’know, the writers of the damn show (one Grey’s source told EW it was “an ungrateful slap in the face”). Today, Heigl wishes she would’ve handled the situation differently. “I should have said nothing,” she told Doherty. “I should have said, ‘Oh, I forgot [to submit my work],’ because it created such a maelstrom that was so unnecessary, and it really was.”

Nevertheless, she stands by her decision not to submit. “I was kind of trying to make a bit of a snarky point about my material that year, but I was also just not feeling my material. I didn’t think I had anything that warranted even the consideration for a nomination. I just wasn’t proud of my work,” Heigl said. “I would never be so bold or so arrogant to turn down a nomination. I would take that nomination if it came my way. I’d be down. But I just knew there wasn’t anything that would really warrant one that year, and I was trying to be honorable, I guess. I was trying to have some integrity. I wasn’t trying to be a dick.”

Actually, Heigl stands by most of the stances she was taking back in the aughts. Speaking with Meredith Grey herself last year, Heigl reflected with Ellen Pompeo in Variety’s Actors on Actors series that she “got on my soapbox and I had some things to say, and I felt really passionate about this stuff. I felt really strongly. I felt so strongly that I also got a megaphone out on my soapbox. There was no part of me that imagined a bad reaction. I felt really justified in how I felt about it and where I was coming from.” The “strong reaction” forced her to grapple with whether she actually was “difficult,” but she ultimately made peace with it in her “mid to late 30s”: “That’s when I got comfortable with my role as the villain, and really enjoyed it.”

Luckily, society has evolved at least a little bit past assuming a woman is “difficult” just for speaking up about things they believe in (Pompeo has said Heigl was “100 percent right” about the show’s “crazy hours” and that she was “ahead of her time” for speaking out). As for the Grey’s family, there seems to be no lingering drama—beyond reuniting with Pompeo for Actors on Actors, Heigl joined some of the OG cast members (Pompeo, Justin Chambers, Chandra Wilson, and James Pickens Jr.) on stage at the Emmys in January 2024 to celebrate the show’s lasting legacy—and as the show’s only Emmy winner to this day, Heigl remains a huge part of it.