Grey's Anatomy without Sandra Oh? Totally unimaginable. But in her 2015 book, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person, Shonda Rhimes confessed that — just like with Scandal — the role almost went to the wrong actress. Before Oh's audition, the team was pushing to cast a particular actor, and Rhimes just wasn't sold.
"I, too, thought she was great," Rhimes said of the actor. "But I did not want to cast her. Now I know what I did not know then — at this level, everyone is a great actor; there are no bad actors, there are just actors who do not fit your vision. This actor was just . . . not the key that fit the lock that turned the story in my brain." The next day, the team met Oh, and the rest is history.