Eye candy! The men of Shondaland — Shonda Rhimes’ TV production company — have been making viewers swoon since Grey’s Anatomy premiered in 2005.
Patrick Dempsey — whose character on the medical drama, Dr. Derek Shepherd, earned the nickname “McDreamy” — has said that his kids aren’t impressed by his heartthrob status. Dempsey shares three children with his wife, Jillian Fink: daughter Talula, born in 2002, and twin boys Sullivan and Darby, born in 2007.
“Oh, yeah, they make fun of me,” the Maine native told Entertainment Tonight in August 2019, four years after he left the series. “They don’t let me take my stuff too seriously, which is good.”
Tony Goldwyn — who played President Fitzgerald “Fitz” Thomas Grant III on Scandal — is well aware that good-looking leading men are a calling card of every Shondaland series.
“Oh, yeah. Shonda has a whole thing she teases us about,” the Divergent actor told The Cut in February 2016. “She says in Shondaland, in the love scenes, the boys have to be the ones to take their clothes off, and the women, the girls can do whatever they want.”
While speaking with Vanity Fair in April 2021 about her Netflix show Bridgerton, Rhimes said that she wanted to focus on the feminine perspective in the TV adaptation of Julia Quinn‘s novels.
“What I liked was the ability to explore things from a woman’s point of view. I wanted the female gaze happening in the books to happen on television,” she told the outlet.
Regé-Jean Page, who starred as Simon Basset in season 1 of the historical-romance series, decided to leave the show after its acclaimed debut. Rhimes told Vanity Fair that although Page is “amazing,” she and her business partner, Betsy Beers, are well-versed in finding dashing leading men to replace outgoing cast members.
“That’s our job and something that Betsy and I have been doing since — well, God, has it been 20 years now? — is finding guys. I mean, hopefully ladies too, but finding men that our audiences find devastatingly attractive, and they become incredibly overly attached to, and they get enraged about when we move them about in any way,” the showrunner said.
Season 2 of the period drama focused on Lord Anthony Bridgerton, played by Jonathan Bailey, whose search for love was a steamy one. The England native defended the show’s focus on sex and the interior lives of women during a February 2022 conversation with Entertainment Weekly.
“There’s so many people who will go, ‘Oh, yeah, Bonkerton.’ But the female gaze is so important because there are many ways people communicate by sex, and what sex means and what your body means to someone else. It’s important that there’s an inversion of sexuality and how people are exploited in the storytelling of sex,” he explained.
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