Katherine Heigl Revisits Grey's Anatomy Controversy: 'I Wasn't Trying To Be A Dick'

Katherine Heigl is setting the record straight about her past squabble with Grey’s Anatomy.

The actor upset the show’s writers and producers in 2008 after opting out of Emmy consideration for her performance as Dr. Izzie Stevens.

However, on Friday’s episode of Shannen Doherty’s Let’s Be Clear podcast, Katherine disputed the suggestion that she’d turned down a nomination.

“I didn’t turn it down,” she said. “You have to submit yourself. You have to submit your work, and then they deliberate and then they decide if they want to give you a nomination. I just didn’t submit my work that year.”

She later added: “I was trying to have some integrity. I wasn’t trying to be a dick.”

Katherine, who was one of the leading stars of Grey’s Anatomy, had said at the time that she wasn’t “given the material this season to warrant an Emmy nomination”. Her statement was especially notable since she had won an Emmy for her performance on the series one year earlier.

“The show bent over backwards to accommodate her film schedule, and then she criticises the show for lack of material?” a supposed Grey’s Anatomy insider told Entertainment Weekly after her statement was released. “It’s an ungrateful slap in the face to the very writers responsible for her Emmy win in the first place.”

On Let’s Be Clear, Katherine seemed regretful about her 2008 comments. She suggested that she “should have said nothing” instead, since her remarks “created such a maelstrom”.

But she also said that her words were motivated by frustration.

“I was kind of trying to make a bit of a snarky point about my material that year, but I was also just not feeling my material,” she told Doherty. “I just wasn’t proud of my work.”

She added: “I would never be so bold or so arrogant to turn down a nomination. I would take that nomination if it came my way. I’d be down. But I just knew there wasn’t anything that would really warrant one that year, and I was trying to be honorable, I guess.”

Katherine had found herself embroiled in separate beef in 2008 when she called Knocked Up — the box-office hit she starred in opposite Seth Rogen — “a little sexist”.

She’s currently set to appear in a new comedy with John Travolta and Christopher Walken, among others.