After McDreamy, George O’Malley returns to ‘Grey's Anatomy’

The surprises keep on coming for Grey's Anatomy fans!

During Thursday's episode of the ABC medical drama, TR Knight made a shocking return while appearing in a dream sequence with Ellen Pompeo's character Meredith Grey as she continued to battle the novel coronavirus. Knight's character, George O’Malley, was the first of the five original interns to leave the show in 2009. He died in the season five finale, after sacrificing himself to save a woman from being hit by a bus.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly at the time, Knight, 47, said he had a gradual “breakdown of communication” between himself and executive producer Shonda Rhimes. He headed to Broadway after his time on Grey’s Anatomy and is now starring in HBO Max's miniseries, The Flight Attendant.

During last week's episode, Meredith continued to go in and out of consciousness and found herself returning to the same beach dream sequence where she reunited with her late husband Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey), who died in an April 2015 episode. “Wonderful and completely surprising things are absolutely possible,” executive producers Andy Reaser and Meg Marinis said of the cast returns last month.

Following the season 17 premiere, showrunner Krista Vernoff spoke about how the team went to great lengths to keep Dempsey's surprise return under wraps. "I have to say that it was an epic feat," she recently told Deadline. "I didn’t send cuts to the studio and network that included that last scene. I didn’t have writers’ assistants in the room for the last couple of months. There were writers who didn’t know we were doing this on that staff. Most of the actors didn’t know. The crew didn’t know either."

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