Spoilers ahead for Grey’s Anatomy’s Season 8 finale from 2012. All seasons of the medical drama can be streamed with a Netflix subscription, Hulu subscription or Disney+ subscription.
We have witnessed some pretty unforgettable Grey’s Anatomy episodes over the past two decades, and it’s safe to say that the plane crash that ended Season 8 was one of them. Not only did we witness Lexie Grey’s traumatic (and highly memed) death, but Mark Sloan succumbed to his injuries not long after. There were other unintended consequences in the aftermath of “Flight,” as Jessica Capshaw recalled an interaction she had with a fan after filming wrapped.
Jessica Capshaw starred as Arizona Robbins on Grey’s Anatomy from Seasons 5 to 14, and she opened up about her experience filming the Season 8 finale on her podcast Call It What It Is. The whole ordeal sounded taxing on the actress, who was in the third trimester of a pregnancy when the crew went on location for a grueling 10-day shoot. She explained:
We shoot the episode, and in order to get the blood and stuff — and Arizona had quite a lot of blood and stuff on her face and in her hair — the best way to get it out was shaving cream. So you’d get shaving cream and you’d just lather it up all over, and there was something about it that would remove the gooky stuff. And then a hot towel.
Since they were staying at a hotel while on location at Big Bear Lake, nobody usually saw the actors all dirty and bloody at the end of the shoot. However, on that final day, Jessica Capshaw was ready to get home, so she hit the road and went a bit “numb” as she started coming down from the trauma Arizona had just experienced. That was when she hit the freeway and was seen by a fellow driver. In her words:
I’m sitting in traffic and I’m looking out the window, and I’m processing and everything else, and I look to my left, because there’s a car there. This woman turns, locks eyes with me, and her face registers what I look like, which is like I’m in a horror movie. Like I’ve got blood everywhere. I look like I’ve been completely, I mean, she did not know what to do.
The actress — who will appear on 9-1-1: Nashville when it premieres this fall on the 2025 TV schedule — was in her car, zoned out and exhausted, and she looked like she’d just spent four days fighting off death in the wilderness. Capshaw continued:
I mean, I couldn’t hear her because she was in a car, but it was like she screamed, ‘Do you need help?’ and there was nothing I could actually say back that would be comforting to her, right? Like besides rolling down my window, asking her to roll down hers and stopping in the middle of the freeway to say, ‘Oh no, don’t worry, I’m on a TV show. We just filmed.’
All credit to the fellow driver for expressing willingness to help someone who appeared to be in need, and I’m sure Jessica Capshaw did what she could to assure the other woman that she was fine. Either way, the actress still thinks about that driver and wonders if she was affected by the unfortunate interaction, saying:
So that woman is out there in the world somewhere today, and she has some story about — and it probably is sad, right? She probably imagines that I was a sad person. But I’m here to tell you that if you ever hear this, it was not sad, it was just me coming home from work.
I hope either that other driver saw the Grey’s Anatomy episode and recognized Jessica Capshaw or comes across the podcast, because I can only imagine she’d be relieved to know she did not unwittingly abandon a bloody, broken stranger on the freeway.
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Jessica Capshaw returned for one Grey’s episode in Season 20, but otherwise, she’s moved on to other projects. Catch her on 9-1-1: Nashville, and tune in for Grey’s Anatomy Season 22, both airing on ABC this fall with episodes streaming the next day on Hulu.