Before There Was McDreamy
Kyle MacLachlan Knows Why He Lost McDreamy Role To Patrick Dempsey
The ‘Twin Peaks’ star is one of several actors who nearly played Derek Shepherd.
It’s nearly impossible to imagine Grey’s Anatomy without Patrick Dempsey’s performance as Derek “McDreamy” Shepherd. But in another world, a different leading man might have been scrubbing in at Seattle Grace.
Kyle MacLachlan opened up in his new memoir, Fictional Selves, about auditioning for the handsome neurosurgeon role in 2004. He said the part was in his “general wheelhouse,” per Entertainment Weekly. “I know this kind of guy. I can be this kind of guy.” Case in point: Just a few years earlier, he’d played another dashing doctor, Trey MacDougal, Charlotte’s first husband on Sex and the City.
Still, MacLachlan doubted he could pull off a romantic lead like Derek. “I don’t know if I have the requisite smolder appeal to get cast as this kind of guy,” he wrote. Even after what he felt was a good audition, he suspected the show wanted a different kind of leading man. “I sense they want something more for this guy. Something dreamier. And that’s just never been in my comfort zone,” he added.
As MacLachlan sees it, that kind of heartthrob appeal can’t be learned. “I believe it’s a quality a person is born with,” he wrote. Even so, it’s fun to imagine the Twin Peaks alum as Derek.
The Other Almost-McDreamys
Two decades of Grey’s fandom have made clear that Dempsey was the right man for the job. But he wasn’t a shoo-in from day one, and several other actors came close to playing Derek.
Isaiah Washington, who went on to play Dr. Preston Burke, also auditioned for Derek; he shared in Lynette Rice’s How to Save a Life: The Inside Story of Grey’s Anatomy. In the same book, Rob Lowe revealed he was offered the role but chose to lead a different medical drama instead: the short-lived CBS series Dr. Vegas, which aired just five episodes before it was canceled.
“My picker was awesome!” Lowe joked about the decision. “I just had a better meeting with CBS. The scripts were incomparable. The vibe around Dr. Vegas was great. The script for Grey’s Anatomy was great. I went with the vibe over the script. The rest, as they say, is McDreamy.”
ABC wanted Lowe for the part, but the creative team felt he was “not exactly who we had in mind” for Derek, Grey’s director and executive producer Peter Horton said. Once Lowe stepped away, Dempsey swooped in. “The network initially was resistant to it, but we really felt right about it,” Horton said.
The show had found its person.
