The actor reveals his challenge of bidding goodbye to a character whom he has been portraying for the past seven years, how much he identified with Levi Schmitt, and why he thinks queer people are being made the villains in the current political environment.
Yet again in Grey’s Anatomy , the fans have said goodbye to a wonderful doctor.
The popular medical series in the previous week’s episode prepared the viewers for the exit of Levi Schmitt (Jake Borelli), as Monica Beltran (Natalie Morales) offers him a paediatric research position in Texas due to the fact that his ABSITE scores were not sufficient for a fellow in paediatrics at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital.
Transitioning to this week, the seventh episode of season 21 flushed out Schmitt’s narrative, and Levi was done in Seattle. He bid adieu to his best friends, Taryn Helm (Jaicy Elliot) and Jo Wilson (Camilla Luddington), prepped a ‘grad’ nurse out of the neonatal intensive care unit as well as assisted in mending wounds of his residents caused by Mika Yasuda (Midori Francis) who was involved in a nasty car crash. At the end of the episode, during one of their last scenes, Jo and Levi share a heartfelt moment reminiscing about how they met, eventually sleeping together and becoming friends, with Jo requesting Levi to be the godfather of her twins.
Schmitt’s last loose end to theta was his romance with James, the Grey Sloan’s chaplain (Michael Thomas Grant). The two had decided on long distance, too, until one phone call from Jo made fearless Levi decide from rather logic-defying actions that, one crying instructs a village for the husband, do not want long-distance romance, “Come with me, I am in love, and you can call me fella no more, I was about to do this, uh, stay in one territory with a bloke but can’t.
“He has long desired that type of affiliation and, more importantly, I think it would have been pretty simple for Levi to just stick around,” Borelli notes to The Hollywood Reporter concerning his concluding episode of Grey’s Anatomy. “[It’s a good retcon in terms of character motivations that James was waiting for this change and for Levi to do what he did.] It was a turning point for me especially when I saw him finally making a decision for himself,” Borelli explained.
In the past, showrunner Meg Marinis spoke to THR and has promised that the audience should expect to see how Levi has developed in his very last episode. ‘If you can recall how I introduced Levi in the first instance, he was a bespectacled intern, naive and lost. People however will rejoice as they will find out that after seven years, he has found himself, not only as a person but even as a doctor – and that will be actually respected,’’ she added.
Now, the actor recalls what that growth means. He admits he was “devastated” when he first learned of his exit, particularly from such a progressive television show, given the present political situation, his likeness to Levi — such as both of them coming out (“I had to muster up some sort of like Levi courage to do that,” he recalls) in the show as well as in real life, and if possible a Texas spin-off should Gray’s Anatomy even have a future.
I’ve also reviewed the screener for Levi’s last episode. I duly apologise for what happened.
Filming this, I was also quite sad, so I can understand where you are coming from. (Laughs)
What has character growth been like for you over these seven years?
It is undeniable that I have also contributed to Levi’s own development over the years. She and I are rather alike, I believe, because it is by comparison designed. It means most of what growth he has shown on screen has really been true to life. I mean just literal things, like us, coming out. I remember coming out in public about the same time as he was featured on the show bearing the same name, and I even had to try to find some Levi-like crutches to do that. Yes, it was scary, at that point in time, however, it has transformed my life in the same measure as it has transformed his life. In some aspects of my life, I have become much more self-assured and certain of how I wish to express myself and who I want to be in the world.
How has it felt to play a character so similar to yourself in such a successful show?
I mean, it’s crazy because like every day you live, you don’t know what’s in store for you and I was never able to know what the next scripts were going to be like. There was something beautiful in being able to live through Levi and to mix him up with some of the attributes I had aspired to cultivate in myself, such as being kind, brave, and embracing life. And most importantly, seeing him really do this made me want to do it more in my life.
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