When it came to directing her own love scene on Grey’s Anatomy, Kim Raver called upon a special someone for help.
The 56-year-old actress exclusively tells PEOPLE how her husband Manu Boyer, who she co-directed the Lifetime movie Tempting Fate with in 2019, helped her to prepare for directing the love scene between her and Sophia Bush on the April 3 episode of the ABC medical drama.
“The funniest thing [is] my husband was like, ‘So, you’re directing yourself in a love scene?’ I was like, ‘And yeah, and it’s with Sophia Bush,’” she recalls. “He was like, ‘Hold on’ and then I said to him, ‘And now I need to use you to help me block it out so that I can talk to the intimacy coordinator and really be sure of how to best show what my vision is.’”
When asked about her husband’s reaction to helming the steamy moment between her character Teddy and Bush’s Cass Beckman, Raver admits, “I couldn’t tell whether he was like, ‘This is so awesome,” or, ‘Wait, how are you going to do this?’”
“And I was like, ‘This is how we’re going to do it,’” she says of blocking the love scene. “I was like, ‘You’re going to be Teddy, I’m going to be Cass, and I’m going to show you what we’re going to do.’ ”
Once she was on the set, Raver says it was “sort one of those out-of-body experiences,” adding, “I have to say, because we have such an incredible team at Grey’s, and I worked really closely with our intimacy coordinator because I also really wanted to make sure that Sophia felt absolutely comfortable and also comfortable to say what she wanted to do and what she didn’t want to do because I’m also directing it.”
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“So that’s where also an intimacy coordinator was really key because the way that works, I think it gave freedom for Sophia to say just sort of what she needed in that scene,” she continues. “And then the actual directing of it, once we settled on the blocking, was just incredible.”
“Sophia is so talented and she’s such a professional, and I have to say, I know there’s been a lot of discussion about women supporting women, but I really genuinely felt such an incredible support from her and collaboration with me directing, that actually made the scene so fun to film,” she adds.
The drama was clearly reserved for onscreen as Teddy had a major realization as things heated up between her and Cass. Teddy pumped the brakes on the hookup and tearfully admitted, “This is not gonna fix my marriage. I’m so sorry.”
However, Raver says there was “a lot of laughs” behind the scenes, adding, “It was really funny.”
