Katherine Heigl is setting the record straight about her 2008 squabble with “Grey’s Anatomy.”
The actor upset the show’s writers and producers that year after opting out of Emmy consideration for her performance as Dr. Izzie Stevens — but on Friday’s episode of Shannen Doherty’s “Let’s Be Clear” podcast, Heigl 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.”
Heigl, 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 criticizes the show for lack of material?” a “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,” Heigl seemed regretful about her 2008 comments. She suggested that she “should have said nothing” instead, since her remarks “created such a maelstrom.”
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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.”
Heigl 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.