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McKidd stays put on ‘Grey’s Anatomy’

Actor Kevin McKidd will enter his sixth season as Dr. Owen Hunt on ABC's 'Grey's Anatomy.'

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — One of his co-stars on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy has announced that she’ll be leaving the show at the end of the coming season, and another races cars to add some excitement to his life, but Kevin McKidd says that he’s happy just where he is, thank you.

“I’m from the Highlands of Scotland. ... I still can’t believe that I’m living in Hollywood, on a TV show, playing this great character, with these amazing actors around me,” said the actor at an ABC party earlier this month.

As the show returns Sept. 26, McKidd’s entering his sixth season as Dr. Owen Hunt, and “I just feel very lucky,” he said.

We spoke before Sandra Oh, who plays Dr. Cristina Yang, Owen’s colleague — and sometime wife — planned to leave after the coming 10th season. But it looks as if Grey’s creator, Shonda Rhimes, may have been planning for Oh’s exit by giving Cristina and Owen a pretty definitive-looking breakup at the end of last season.

“I’ve been very lucky with that character,” said McKidd, who previously starred in HBO’s Rome and NBC’s Journeyman.

“He’s had many different facets and I know that in the next few seasons — speaking to Shonda — that they plan to really sort of break open Owen even more,” McKidd said. “Because we learned a bit about his time in the war, but we don’t really know much about his family and the other parts of his life.

“I’ve played a couple of great characters — in Rome, the Vorenus character was an amazing character that Bruno Heller wrote for me, and again, Owen Hunt feels in a similar vein, a kind of very complex and sort of dark, sometimes, character. And I’m always attracted by slightly darker, tortured characters.”

Patrick Dempsey, who plays Dr. Derek Shepherd, the surgeon also known as “McDreamy,” has, like Oh, been with Grey’s from the beginning. A race-car driver in his offscreen life, he has a four-part documentary, Patrick Dempsey: Racing Le Mans, premiering Aug. 28, on Velocity.

“When you’re in a long show, there’s less discovery and more of an endurance of having to be present and to do your job and find ways to keep yourself turned on in something that you know is going to be A, B, and C,” he said.

“In a race it changes constantly. Every lap, every corner, every moment of that day is changing. And that, to me, is very exciting and keeps me alive. And then I can go back to work and enjoy it.”

McKidd doesn’t yet appear to require that level of excitement. (Or at least he laughed when I asked if he’d taken up skydiving. And mentioned tennis.)

“I think probably what Patrick meant is that when you’re in a movie set, even when the show, when it’s finished and out there, is exciting, we do 14-hour-long days and we wait for maybe 45 minutes” between scenes.

McKidd has other ways to escape.

“I’m from a wee town called Elgin, which is near Inverness,” he said, adding that his parents would be visiting for his birthday (he turned 40 on Aug. 9).

“I try to go back to Scotland twice a year because it just sort of grounds me, you know what I mean? Because I love my life here, but it is very unreal. So it’s nice to go back to my hometown at least a couple of times a year and just walk it. All my pals are still my pals, and, I mean, nothing’s really changed, and I’m living this great roller-coaster ride right now, but my life really is also that. I’m not removed from that.”