An actor who starred on and was a writer for Grey's Anatomy would get anxiety coming up with ideas for the show.
Dan Bucatinsky recalled how horrible it was having his own medical anxieties, including what he called hypochondria, while being a writer on the medical drama.
Bucatinsky played the character Jeffrey, who appeared in one episode on Season 6 of the medical drama. He is best known for his role as White House Press Secretary James Novak on another Shonda Rhimes drama, Scandal. He served as a writer on both shows, as well as a consulting producer on Grey's Anatomy.
Bucatinsky opened up about his experience on the Call It What It Is podcast, hosted by former Grey's Anatomy actors Jessica Capshaw and Camilla Luddington.
"Well I tell you, writing on Grey's Anatomy as a hypochondriac was such a bad idea," he said. "You know that every morning at six in the morning, you would receive an email called the 'Morning Medical'... [where] researchers would find some incredible, real story of something that happened to someone for real somewhere."
Bucatinsky added that what made it worse was that so many of the characters were pediatricians that he had to make up storylines for.
"So all I would do is wake up in a fit of anxiety, like, 'oh my god, now I have that to worry about'," he explained.
Capshaw then detailed how she managed playing the quirky pediatric surgeon, Arizona Robbins, given all the heart wrenching storylines.
"I would just ignore the fact that it had come from a real story, and I would say [to myself], 'this is fake blood, and this is an actor playing a sick child, and so this is all make believe'," she said.
Bucatinsky also recalled some other plots he had to write about and balked at the fact he would up writing for a medical drama given his anxieties around health.
"How I wound up on a medical show given my feelings about medicine in general, was just crazy," he said.
"And then I wound up writing the most ridiculous episode based on a true story about a magician who sawed his assistant in half as part of the show, but actually sawed her in half."
Grey's Anatomy first premiered on ABC in 2005 and helped launch the careers of many of its stars, including Ellen Pompeo, Katherine Heigl, Patrick Dempsey and Sandra Oh.
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