Camilla Luddington has been telling fans to watch Grey’s Anatomy live for weeks, so it’s not her fault that some people didn’t listen.
Anyone who didn’t watch Thursday’s two-hour premiere live on East Coast time likely did regret it, because the last 30 seconds of the episode offered its biggest surprise in five years: Patrick Dempsey returned as Derek Shepherd.
Derek is still dead and he’s only appearing to Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) in a dream sequence because she’s currently very ill, but it’s still the first time Dempsey has returned to the show since Derek’s 2015 death and it was a huge surprise.
While showrunner Krista Vernoff revealed that many actors, crew and even network execs were unaware of the cameo, Luddington tells E! News that she was one of the lucky ones—or as she says, maybe one of the “nosy ones.”
“I found out from Krista,” she says. “I didn’t know that some actors didn’t know. I thought we all knew, but I guess we didn’t.”