While Chandra Wilson may know mentally that she’s playing a role, it’s not always the same physically. “Your body doesn’t know that you are acting,” she explained to the Radio Times. “So it does sometimes take a minute to calm your body down and tell it, ‘no, we were just pretending.'”
Wilson wouldn’t be the first performer to express difficulties with setting healthy boundaries between fantasy and reality — there are plenty of actors who were never the same after a role. Recently, Austin Butler made headlines when he revealed that his voice had been forever altered by impersonating Elvis for long periods of time, while Hugh Laurie reportedly still had his limp from “House” as recently as 2021.
Still, there’s a helpful trick that Wilson can use if she ever starts to feel like her body doesn’t know what’s real and what’s “Grey’s Anatomy”: If she’s not actively experiencing what it’s like to give birth to a baby in a hospital with an active explosive in it while at the same time her husband has extensive emergency surgery after a severe car accident and then also the building gets set on fire and also sometimes there’s an active shooter and other times everyone she knows is in a plane crash? If that’s not happening? She’s probably in the real world.