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Kate Walsh Opens Up About Her Emotional Return to 'Grey's Anatomy' & Talks Future on the Show

Kate Walsh Opens Up About Her Emotional Return to 'Grey's Anatomy' & Talks Future on the Show

Kate Walsh is opening up about her return to Grey’s Anatomy!

It was announced earlier last month that the actress would be reprising her role as Addison Forbes Montgomery on the 18th season of the show, which premiered on September 30.

During a press conference on Monday (October 18), she discussed what it was like being back on the show, as well as what her future on the series might be.

Click inside to find out what she said…

Kate began by saying she was extremely happy to see that fans were so excited to her return to the show.

“It felt just beautiful and I was so pleased,” she told reporters, per Variety. “For years and years, there wasn’t an interview that I’ve ever done where someone hasn’t said, ‘So fans are wondering, will you ever go back to Grey’s?’ And so, I did.”

“I think it seems successful,” she continued. “I was very satisfied and delighted by it. And, honestly, that’s always been [the thought]: you do this for the fans. One of the great experiences of having been on Grey’s way back in the day, when it first began, was this crazy meaning of it being critically acclaimed and being a delight to do as an actor, [while] having mass appeal and having fans just love it.”

She also recalled running into her former co-star Patrick Dempsey on a plane from France a month before she was set to reprise her role.

“I told him I was going to come back, and he had said, ‘Oh, it’s going to be so intense for you. And so emotional, like so many feels and then closure, too, in a strange way,’” she said. “When we started that show, it was such a very specific time for all of us, and the entire cast…it really changed every single person’s life in a pretty dramatic way.”

Kate described returning to the show as a “fever dream” and added, “It was easy to show up, emotionally, and just all of a sudden get cracked open in the elevator because there’s just so much.”

The actress teased what’s to come in her next episode, hinting that fans would see “Addison and Amelia’s dynamic play out.”

“That was a total delight for me, and I think fans will enjoy that, as well. It’s a completely different kind of episode than the first one, but intensely intimate and satisfying.”

She went on to discuss the emotional moment shared between Addison and Ellen Pompeo‘s character Meredith in the latest episode, where Addison breaks down over the death of her ex Derek Shepherd.

“I thought the writing was so beyond,” she gushed. “[Writer Jamie Denbo] wrote it in such a sophisticated way: ‘I thought he’d be here.’ It’s so not what you’d expect. It’s so tangential, it’s so not how she’s feeling, it’s not on the nose. It was so beautiful. One of my other friends who works in post was talking about it just that specificity of the writing in that moment was so good. And I just loved it.”

She said of reuniting with her former co-star, “Ellen’s just awesome, because we’re just two people who, literally up through rolling, are just gabbing, and then you stop and then go into the scene,” she said. “She’s literally telling me, ‘Oh, this is where you can get your smoothies from, this is where you should go.’ And then it’s action.”

As for whether she’d consider returning to the show for the longer term, Kate said, “Right now we’re just doing a few episodes and we’ll see what happens.”

“I was excited, though, to make the comeback to where it all began for me,” she explained. “The couple of episodes that we shot, there was a great response to that first one, and I think the second one people are gonna really love, too. Nobody knows what the future holds… but for now, this is what we’ve got planned: just to have Addison pop in and we’ll see what happens, what transpires.”

Earlier this month, the showrunner for Grey’s Anatomy discussed how the series could potentially end. Check it out

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Photos: Getty Images
Posted to: Greys Anatomy, Kate Walsh