The men of Shondaland (Shonda Rhimes’ production company) have been making viewers swoon since Grey’s Anatomy premiered in 2005.
Patrick Dempsey — whose Grey’s character Dr. Derek Shepherd was nicknamed “McDreamy” — was never bothered by his heartthrob status. “It’s not necessarily me, but it does help your ego,” Dempsey told Parade in 2008.
Tony Goldwyn, who played President Fitzgerald “Fitz” Thomas Grant III on Scandal, also knew that good-looking leading men are a calling card of every Shondaland series.
“[Rhimes] 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,” Goldwyn told The Cut in 2016.
Jonathan Bailey (Anthony Bridgerton on Bridgerton) had a slightly different take, noting that he doesn’t take kindly to critics who dismiss the series as silly because of the romantic scenes.
“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,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 2022. “It’s important that there’s an inversion of sexuality and how people are exploited in the storytelling of sex.”
Scroll through to see what the men of Shondaland are up to now: