Burning her breakthrough role at the stake: Why Katherine Heigl withdrew her Emmy nomination
For the majority of actors, being nominated for an award is an indication of their talent, with voting bodies deciding that a performance has been deemed so strong it’s been ranked among the year’s best. It was something Katharine Heigl was already familiar with, but she couldn’t sanction the idea of letting it happen twice.
Like many performers before and since, Heigl was an aspiring star searching out the role that would lead to a mainstream breakthrough, which wasn’t going to happen, stepping into Mira Sorvino’s shoes as the co-lead of unnecessary made-for-television origin story Romy and Michele: In the Beginning. Fortunately, that very same year, she was cast in Grey’s Anatomy.
The never-ending medical drama that’s inexplicably 20 seasons deep at this point was a hit from the second it premiered in March 2005, with Heigl’s Dr Isobel Stevens a key component of the main cast. It’s always hard to stand out in a crowded ensemble, but the accolades that came her way indicated she was doing a stellar job of emerging as the show’s breakout star.
As well as being nominated for a Golden Globe in the ‘Best Supporting Actress – Series, Miniseries or Television Film’ category, Heigl won a Primetime Emmy for ‘Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series’. The longer the series went on, though, the less enthused about her contributions she started to become.
When Heigl was shortlisted for another Emmy in 2008 for Grey’s Anatomy, she shocked the industry by withdrawing her name from consideration. In a statement that must have felt like a slap in the face to the writing team, she explained that “I did not feel that I was given the material this season to warrant an Emmy nomination.” Putting her forward for work she wasn’t proud of wouldn’t have been fair “to maintain the integrity of the organisation,” and she didn’t want to “potentially take away an opportunity from an actress who was given such materials.”
Needless to say, the writers and showrunners were both blindsided and offended by such public denigration of the dialogue and storylines she’d been paid to perform, and it became clear that a dissolution between the two parties was on the horizon. Sure enough, she was released from her contract before the end of the sixth season and has never again set foot on the set of Grey’s Anatomy.
Playing the blame game can be a double-edged sword in such a ruthless industry, and effectively rejecting the chance to compete for a high-profile award by publicly shaming the subpar quality of the writers was a risky gambit. Unfortunately for Heigl, it ended up impacting her career after she was tarred with a certain brush.
“I may have said a couple of things you didn’t like,” she admitted to The Washington Post. “But then that escalated to ‘she’s ungrateful’, then that escalated to ‘she’s difficult’, and that escalated to ‘she’s unprofessional.'” She’s continued trundling along on screens both big and small, but refusing an Emmy nomination stands out as a defining moment of Heigl’s time in the spotlight, for better or worse.
