EXPLORE All The Shades of Grey

Hello, everyone!

This is Gabrielle writing. We hope you enjoyed the episode. We had a great time writing it. And a great time casting it. We were so excited to get such amazing guest stars. Who knew Natalie Cole would let us put a fork in her neck! A prosthetic fork actually, but it looked very real, even in person. We were joking that she should leave it in and go out to dinner that evening. “Excuse me waiter, but I seem to have misplaced my fork…”

Natalie was really lovely in real life and we were super impressed with her performance. If only we had known when we were writing the script that Natalie was going to be our Sylvia. We would’ve written in a couple songs for her to sing. How cool would that have been?

We were also excited to get Teddy Dunn to play Heath our overly enthusiastic hockey player. When he left after his audition, I turned to Peter Horton and said, “Oh, My God. He plays Duncan Cain, Veronica’s boyfriend on Veronica Mars. I love him!” Peter looked at me like I was nuts, but Harry and I watch that show religiously and think Teddy is an amazing actor. I love his expression when he tells George he cut off his own finger. I tried very hard not to stalk him around the set for VM nuggets.

I loved shooting all the stuff with Cristina and Bailey’s baby. The sad truth is I didn’t have to dig very deep to write those scenes. I am terrible with babies. I have no experience with them and am always convinced I’m going to drop them. I’m especially terrified when they’re super-super small. I’m afraid I’m going to hold them wrong and their little head is going to just snap off and roll away. How do I explain that to their parents? Just this weekend, my sister Lexie was in town with her six week old baby daughter, Zuzu. I was holding Zuzu, and doing pretty well I thought, until Lexie turned to me and said, “Why are you holding her like she’s going to explode or something?” I guess I’ll stick with my dog.

Finally, I hope everyone thought the “Burke and George’s All-Star Band” was as hilarious as we did. Isaiah plays the trumpet in real life.,. but T.R. worked really hard to get the finger moves down for his clarinet playing. Maybe we should get them to play at Joe’s Bar sometime. Natalie could sing!

Cheers, Gabrielle.

P.S. Harry, here. So even though “Grey’s” is set in Seattle, it doesn’t mean that we’re Seattle sports fans, well at least not me. If I can just say… the Pittsburgh Steelers are world champions.

Shonda threw a fabulous Super Bowl party so everyone could watch the bomb in the chest/Super Bowl episode, and, believe it or not, there were a few of us (all boys) there to actually watch the game before the episode aired.

Shonda gave us sports watchers our own dedicated viewing room, with a HUGE plasma TV. I sat across from Steve Bailey, Joe the Bartender, who is as big a Seahawk fan as I am a Steeler fan. There was good natured and rather spirited cheering throughout the game that ended in a hug of mutual respect post-game.

Then Shonda saw something she said she’d never seen before – “man weeping” as I watched the Steelers hoist the Lombardi Trophy. One for the thumb.