Why Kim Raver Wanted to ‘Raise the Stakes’ with Grey’s Anatomy Open Marriage Storyline and What’s to Come in the Fallout (Exclusive)
Raver tells PEOPLE that she wanted to show that “Teddy had evolved” and the open marriage wasn’t “just a cheating thing”
Kim Raveradmits that she had some reservations about her character Teddy and Owen’s open marriage on Grey’s Anatomy.
In an exclusive conversation with PEOPLE, the actress, 56, reveals that she was “scared” and “nervous” when she first learned of the characters’ decision to open their marriage.
“I just wanted to make sure that we showed that Teddy had evolved and that it wasn’t sort of like, oh, just a cheating thing… because I felt like Teddy had messed up so much before that I wanted to make sure that we saw that she had evolved,” she shares. “And [showrunner] Meg [Marinis] was incredible at taking that in and going back with the writers and sort of working that out.”
She recalls discussing the boundary-pushing storyline with Marinis and Kevin McKidd, who plays her husband Dr. Owen Hunt on the ABC medical series, while filming at Joe’s Bar. She explains that the trio broke down “how best to approach something as delicate as an open marriage because we knew everyone’s going to have feelings about it and we had feelings about it.”
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On the April 10 episode of Grey’s Anatomy, Teddy discovered that Owen had been with someone else after making their open marriage pact while she had pulled the brake on her hookup with Cass Beckman (Sophia Bush) after realizing it wouldn’t help fix her marriage.
While she struggled to move forward, Owen reassured her, saying, “I love you. Only you. That night meant nothing.”
Raver “wasn’t surprised at all” that Teddy has immediate regret over the arrangement, telling PEOPLE, “It wasn’t just a fantasy to be fun, it really is now how are these characters going to navigate this? And I think… it’s really interesting that she made a choice because she thought it was going to help her marriage in a weird way.”
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“Teddy sort of sees that Owen and her are not doing well, and so to raise the stakes, it kind of felt to me that it was trying something that may in her mind not be great,” she says. “But what were the other options, like separate from Owen? And I think her love is so deep for Owen and it’s so endgame that when they went to therapy and the therapist adjusted it, she was a couple of steps ahead of Owen, was like, ‘Okay, let’s try it.’”
“And then I think what was interesting was the realization in that moment when she’s with Cass that it’s not going to fix her marriage,” she adds.
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When asked what’s to come for Teddy and Owen — including the inevitable reveal that he slept with Nora (Floriana Lima) — Raver says it will be a “huge storyline.”
“It’s very super entwined and I am so impressed with Teddy on kind of what she has to navigate and how she does it and how she puts her sort of badassery before her own feelings,” she teases. “And so it’s complicated.”
As for whether Grey’s Anatomy fans have seen the last of Bush at Grey Sloan, Raver says, “I can’t say. I think we have to leave that open. No pun intended.”
