Paging Dr. Grey’s scrubs! Ellen Pompeo shed just about every stitch of clothing to pose for Entertainment Weekly’s latest cover, which the magazine revealed on Thursday, Sept. 3.
The 45-year-old Grey’s Anatomy star, who plays Dr. Meredith Grey on the ABC medical drama, is pictured sitting on a bench with her legs crossed, wearing nothing except an open doctor’s coat, a stethoscope, and sexy red pumps. Even her makeup is racy, with bright red lips, smokey eyes, and tousled, wavy hair.
The cover is one of four for the magazine’s feature on shows from Shondaland, the TV production company founded by Grey’s creator Shonda Rhimes. Pompeo’s cover teases, naturally, how Grey’s will move on after killing off Patrick Dempsey’s popular Derek “McDreamy” Shepherd last season. And perhaps a nearly nude and very sexy Mer is a hint at what could be in store for Pompeo’s character, who is now a widowed mother of three.
After all, Rhimes, 45, teased at the Television Critics Association’s press tour in early August that Season 12 will feature Dr. Grey as a single woman. “We do have this world in which Meredith is single, and she is living this life that she hadn’t thought she was going to be living again,” Rhimes said at the time.
As for her decision to have hunky Dr. Shepherd die since Dempsey had decided to leave the award-winning show? It had to be, because otherwise, “that would suggest [Derek and Meredith’s] love wasn’t true, the thing we had said for 11 years was a lie,” Rhimes explained.
While fans certainly weren’t happy about the medical drama killing off the sexy superstar neurosurgeon, it turns out Pompeo wasn’t exactly thrilled with some of the reaction to her TV husband’s death.
“All of a sudden, Patrick [Dempsey] leaves, and it’s like, ‘Oh my god, Meredith’s gonna get killed with Alzheimer’s! The show couldn’t possibly go on without the man!’” she gripes in the new issue of EW.
But guess what? The show will go on, as evidenced by the upcoming season of the long-running drama. And if ABC has any say about it, it’ll continue on for the foreseeable future.
“We have no reason to expect that Grey’s Anatomy won’t go on for many years to come,” Paul Lee, the network’s entertainment president, told reporters at TCA. “We’ve seen the pitch for Grey’s next season. The show reinvents itself again.”
Grey’s Anatomy Season 12 premieres on Thursday, Sept. 24 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.