Grey’s Anatomy ropes in Westworld star for new season

Lena Waithe joins American medical drama for two episodes. Emmy winner Lena Waithe is joining Grey’s Anatomy in season 21 for a two-episode guest arc storyline. Waithe scrubs in for the longest-running US medical drama as Dr Evynn Moore, a former student of Dr Catherine Fox, played by Debbie Allen, who heads to Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital with a unique case pertaining to her wife, reported Deadline.

Fans of the series were given a first look at the Master of None star as her new character as she sits by her wife, played by Andrea Bordeaux, in the hospital. The episode she will appear in, titled Jump (For My Love), will also see Ellen Pompeo’s Meredith Grey returning, as she works with Scott Speedman’s Nick Marsh to treat a liver transplant patient.

The Westworld actor shared the news of her casting on her Instagram stories, writing: “God's dreams are always bigger than ours.”. Grey’s Anatomy will be returning next month after a long winter hiatus. The Emmy-winning procedural drama, currently in its 21st season, first premiered in 2005. In 2019, it became the longest-running primetime medical drama in the US with 332 episodes, a record previously held by ER.

The overall record is held by BBC series Casualty, which has aired in the UK since 1986. In 2022, Pompeo made the shock decision to depart the show. “I am eternally grateful and humbled by the love and support you have all shown me, Meredith Grey and the show for 19 seasons!” she wrote on Instagram at the time.

However, Pompeo continues to return as a recurring character. She also remains an executive producer on the series and narrates the opening and closing voiceovers for each episode. Waithe won an Emmy in 2017 for her writing on Master of None’s season 2 episode Thanksgiving, becoming the first African-American woman to win an Emmy in that category, and has several writing credits including on Queen & Slim, The Chi, Boomerang, and Twenties.

Recently, Waithe produced Emmy-nominated documentary Being Mary Tyler Moore as well as the films A Thousand and One and Kokomo City, both of which premiered at the Sundance film festival in 2023. In October last year, Sarah Drew, who played Dr April Kepner on the series, said the way she was dropped from the show was “mean and unjust”.

Drew, who first appeared in season five, did not have her contract extended when season 14 was being prepped. Speaking about the departure, she told the Call It What It Is podcast that she “was unceremoniously let go in a way that felt mean and unjust, and because of that, the outpouring of love was so enormous it was like you were sitting there watching people [eulogise you]”.