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Sandra Oh calls 'Grey's Anatomy' fame 'traumatic': 'I have a good therapist'

By Megan Armstrong | Last updated 8/30/21

Sandra Oh will forever be Dr. Cristina Yang, but it was a difficult process to become comfortable within her beloved Grey's Anatomy character when the now-longest-running medical drama in primetime television history was just beginning in 2005.

"To be perfectly honest, it was traumatic," Oh told Willie Geist for Sunday TODAY of her instant Grey's fame. "And the reason why I'm saying that is the circumstances you need to do your work is with a lot of privacy, and so when one loses one's anonymity, you have to build skills to still try and be real. I went from not being able to go out, like hiding in restaurants, to then being able to manage attention, manage expectation, while not losing the sense of self."

Geist asked how she did that.

"Well, I have a good therapist," the 50-year-old Canadian actress responded. "I'm not joking. It's very, very important. You just have to work at finding your way to stay grounded, and a lot of times, that's by saying no."

Oh portrayed Yang on Grey's from the pilot through the 10th season finale in May 2014. She earned five-straight Emmy nominations and one Golden Globe victory for how perfectly she embodied the cutthroat cardiothoracic surgeon and "person" to Dr. Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo).

Oh now stars in Netflix comedic drama The Chair as Ji-Yoon Kim, the first-ever woman chair of the flailing and outdated English department at Pembroke University, and explained to Geist why her newest character's name means so much to her.

"I can trace, I feel like, how Hollywood has progressed," Oh, whose parents emigrated from South Korea to Canada, said. "When I was on Grey's Anatomy for 10 years, the show never addressed people's ethnicity. With the show Killing Eve, I was able to bring a certain aspect of Eve's cultural heritage. But in The Chair, when I saw that Dr. Kim's name is Ji-Yoon Kim, now I can play a character who specifically has a Korean name, and all the characters are gonna call her that name correctly."

Oh spoke with Geist over Zoom from London, where she's filming the fourth and final season of Killing Eve—the titular role has garnered her three more Emmy nominations and one more Golden Globe win.

Watch the full segment below.