Grey's Anatomy Crew Had A Much More Filthy Nickname For Patrick Dempsey's McDreamy

Plenty of characters on "Grey's Anatomy" have nicknames, but Derek "McDreamy" Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) probably has the most memorable moniker of the bunch. Oddly enough, the original behind-the-scenes version of Dr. Shepherd's nickname was never uttered on the long-running medical drama, as it would've been considered wildly inappropriate for primetime network television.  

"We called him Dr. McScreamMeF***Me during the pilot. [McDreamy was] the PG-rated version," revealed series creator Shonda Rhimes in an interview for Lynette Rice's book "How to Save a Life: The Inside Story of Grey's Anatomy." "It's really amazing that this thing that we came up with while shooting the pilot, just because Patrick Dempsey is so adorable, stuck." 

Patrick Dempsey has mixed feelings about the "McDreamy" nickname. While he is grateful to have starred in so many great "Grey's Anatomy" episodes – he told Fatherly the role "opened so many doors around the world" for him and provided "the opportunity to do things I wouldn't have been able to do" otherwise – "McDreamy" is also a lot of pressure to live up to.

"If you're a celebrity that has any kind of visibility, people are going to clock you and your behavior," said Dempsey in his Fatherly interview. "Then you have something like McDreamy — it's like, this is supposedly the perfect male. How do you hold that? I'm not that at all."

Be that as it may, Dempsey appears to accept that he'll probably be associated with the flattering alias for the rest of his career.

"It is what it is," he said in 2021, when The Independent asked him how he felt about fans still calling him "McDreamy" six years after his departure from "Grey's Anatomy." "It's a character that some people are just discovering for the first time, so if they see me and it makes them feel good, and my identifying that for them makes them feel validated, then I'm very happy about it."