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Grey's Anatomy " aired a two-part hospital shooting episode for its season six finale. - "I had nightmares and panic attacks while we were shooting," star
Sarah Drew said in a new book.
"Grey's Anatomy" actor Sarah Drew was just finishing her first season on the hit medical drama in 2010 when the show filmed one of its most terrifying finales: season six's hospital shooting event, "Sanctuary" and "Death and All His Friends."
In the two-part episode, a grieving widower named Gary Clark (Michael O'Neill) comes into the hospital with a loaded gun, seeking revenge on Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) and a group of doctors who he blames for his wife's death.
Drew's character, April Kepner, is on the team that Clark targets, and she has two particularly traumatizing scenes in the finale. First, April slips on blood and finds her friend Reed's (Nora Zehetner) dead body in a medical supply closet.
Then, when she comes face-to-face with Clark in the hospital hallway, she has to fight for her life at gunpoint by telling him intimate details of her life. "No one's loved me yet. Please, please!" April begs in the scene. So, Clark turns his gun on Derek once again and wounds him with a near-fatal shot.
Drew revealed just how psychologically traumatizing the filming experience was for her in the new tell-all book "How to Save a Life: The Inside Story of Grey's Anatomy" by
"I had nightmares and panic attacks while we were shooting that, even for several days after we finished," she said.
"It was very intense and scary and hard to go to those places, and then leave them at the door and then come home and be like, 'I'm fine, I'm fine. Nobody's trying to kill me, I didn't just watch my best friend die, I didn't just get covered in her blood," she continued.
Drew explained that, from her perspective, when an actor has to put themselves in the mindset to film trauma it "does something to your body because your body doesn't know that it's not happening" in real life.
According to the book, O'Neill said that he almost didn't take the part of the shooter because someone in his family had been murdered. "I know what happens to families when someone gets cut down," he said. "You don't ever really recover from it."
O'Neill also recalled to Rice how he told "Grey's Anatomy" creator and then-showrunner
According to O'Neill, Rhimes told him "it frightens me, too." He said his wife eventually convinced him to take the part and he did so under the conditions that his character "didn't point a gun at a child and that the character ends his life in the hospital."
"How to Save a Life: The Inside Story of Grey's Anatomy" is out now.