Longtime Grey’s Anatomy viewers received some closure on Thursday night with the surprise return of T.R. Knight’s beloved character George O’Malley, who died at the end of the show’s fifth season.
As happened previously—when Patrick Dempsey’s Dr. Derek Shepherd made an unlikely return last month—George appeared to the show’s namesake character, Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo), on an idyllic beach in Meredith’s dream world as she grappled with the effects of COVID-19 during this ripped-from-the-headlines season.
Knight was an original star on the show, and George initially harbored an unrequited love for Meredith. (They eventually slept together, but the relationship didn’t progress.) In keeping with the breakneck pace of the show’s early romantic entanglements, George later married Callie Torres (Sara Ramirez), had an affair with Izzie Stevens (Katherine Heigl), and even briefly lived with Meredith’s sister Lexie (Chyler Leigh). But by the fifth season, George’s role had greatly diminished, and Knight asked to leave the series. “There just comes a time when it’s so clear that moving on is the best decision,” he said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly months after his exit. The publication reported George had only appeared in 48 minutes of the show’s first nine episodes from season five, a stark contrast with other series regulars like Pompeo and Sandra Oh.
But Knight never publicly harbored any hard feelings toward either Grey’s Anatomy or creator Shonda Rhimes, and later worked with her again on the short-lived ABC drama The Catch. The series aired between 2016 and 2017 and marked Knight’s first interaction with his former boss since his Grey’s departure. “It was incredibly emotional, surprisingly emotional—in a great way—to see them and hug them,” he said of Rhimes and fellow Grey’s Anatomy executive producer Betsey Beers in a 2017 interview with Entertainment Weekly. “Since then, Shonda and I have had a meal together, so it’s been fantastic. It leaves me with a very grateful and thankful heart to be invited back.”
Rhimes is no longer actively involved in the day-to-day process of making Grey’s Anatomy, so George’s return was executed by showrunner Krista Vernoff. In an interview published with Deadline after Thursday’s broadcast, Vernoff said bringing George back into the fold as Meredith fights for her life was the idea that initially sparked this season.
“When I called Ellen and said, I have this idea to have you having these dreams on the beach, and I want to get someone amazing, like T.R., Ellen was like, yes: get T.R., and also Patrick,” Vernoff said—which is how Dempsey also made an unexpected return. “That was the evolution of that. Ellen and T.R. are close, and George and T.R. were both always favorites of mine, and so he was my first idea of, as a fan, who do I want to see again? I wanted to see George, so that’s where it started. And then which episode he went—I don’t know how to explain the evolution of scripts under me, but sometimes you get eleventh-hour evolution. I wrote the scenes, and didn’t know where they were going to go. We hadn’t shot them yet, I think, and then decided.”
Added Knight, “Krista said at one point during our long conversation she thought that this might offer closure, and I was like oh, I think that’s already happened. What was interesting is something my husband, who is much smarter than me—and okay, granted that’s a low bar—said. We were talking about that idea of closure, and he was saying that sometimes closure’s shutting a door, and sometimes it’s revisiting a familiar room, and finding what brought you joy. And it just hit me.”
In their interactions Thursday night, George and Meredith discussed their shared history and the fact that Meredith didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to her longtime friend, who died after being hit by a bus in the fifth season finale. George’s injuries were so severe that they left his face unrecognizable; Meredith only realized he was dying when George was able to share a coded message with her, writing out “007,” a reference to a nickname he received during his early days as an intern.