Before the actor Patrick Dempsey could sit down in the second-floor restaurant of Toronto’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, a group of women celebrating a birthday stopped him, asking for a photo. Dempsey posed among them. His teeth were white, his hair was thick and leonine. The women smiled in a way that verged on hysteria.
Once the pictures were taken, he thanked them, gallantly, for including him in the birthday. The women floated away down the stairs. They were screaming.
Dempsey, who recently turned 60, is a heartthrob precision tuned for light comedy and romance. A professional actor since his teens, he has a daredevil quality that is veined, in much of his work, with sweetness. His niche is the not-so-bad boy you could bring home to mom. Honestly, mom would probably like him, too.
He spent 11 seasons on the hospital soap “Grey’s Anatomy,” playing a neurosurgeon popularly known as McDreamy. In 2023, at 57, he landed the cover of People magazine as, quite credibly, the sexiest man alive.
That’s not so bad for a high-school dropout from rural Maine who once considered himself functionally illiterate. But Dempsey, who is also a decorated racecar driver and a hands-on philanthropist, gave up wanting the romance and the screaming women a while ago.
Since leaving “Grey’s” in 2015, he has spent a decade dismantling that McDreamy persona, albeit in more obscure shows. He played an ethically dubious writer in the Epix mini-series “The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair,” and then a devious chief executive in the Sky Atlantic series “Devils,” and after that a murderous police captain in the Paramount+ series “Dexter: Original Sin.”
Now he has taken on his first major network role since “Grey’s,” in the Fox thriller “Memory of a Killer,” which premiered on Sunday. (It streams on Hulu.) He stars as a devoted father and a grieving widower named Angelo who is also an assassin-for-hire rattled by symptoms of dementia. (It’s a lot!) The role allows Dempsey to play both the kind of hero that made him famous and the morally murky characters he has lately embraced. He also gets to drive a Porsche very, very fast.
“I want to be able to go out and test myself,” he said.
I did not scream when Dempsey, dressed in soft neutrals that matched the oatmeal he would order, finally sat down. But I’ll admit to having seen enough of his romantic comedies (“Sweet Home Alabama,” “Made of Honor”) to feel a little giddy.
In conversation, he is eager, earnest, innately charming, but also discontented by the mismatch between how the world sees him and how he sees himself — as a serious person who is rarely taken seriously. That Sexiest Man Alive thing? He’s grateful for the attention it drew to his foundation, which provides holistic care for cancer patients. Otherwise he finds it embarrassing.
As a child, Dempsey struggled in school. Severely dyslexic, he felt best in motion, particularly when he was skiing. A ski idol of his, Ingemar Stenmark, rode a unicycle, and so a teenage Dempsey sold seeds door to door until he had saved enough to buy one, too. The unicycle led to juggling, juggling led to a talent competition that earned him his first agent. With his parents’ blessing, he skipped his senior year to try acting.
That agent got him an audition for a touring production of Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy.” “He was absolutely adorable,” Fierstein recalled in a recent phone call, “just an absolute angel.”
After that show, Dempsey appeared in a bus-and-truck tour of Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” — from the window of the Ritz, he could see the Toronto theater where the show had played — and a few small movies. In 1987, he starred in “Can’t Buy Me Love,” a hit teen romantic comedy that made him an in-demand juvenile lead.
A decade later, he felt himself faltering in the transition from absolute angel to more adult roles. After some underperforming movies (“Bank Robber,” “Denial”), he turned to television. He did stints on “Will & Grace,” “Once and Again” and “The Practice,” as well as plenty of pilots that were never picked up for series. Then he found his way to “Grey’s Anatomy.”
Shonda Rhimes, who hired him as the charismatic surgeon Dr. Derek Shepherd, admired his effortlessness in the role. “You never feel him acting,” she wrote in an email.
Few people had high hopes for the series — ABC kept pushing back its release — but it was an immediate sensation. That was a relief to Dempsey, and then it was a trap. After a few seasons the stories no longer interested him, and the schedule felt punishing, increasingly unsustainable. His wife, the makeup artist Jillian Dempsey, gave birth to a daughter in 2002 and twin sons in 2007, so home life also felt hectic.
He took up auto racing as an escape, as a way to feel both excitement and complete control. It was not merely an expensive actor hobby: For over a decade, Dempsey drove in races at various levels and classifications in the United States and Europe — including the 24 Hours of Le Mans — and earned several podium finishes.
“When you’re in the car, you’re in the moment,” he said. “You’re functioning in a real life-and-death situation.” But the travel was hard on his marriage, and he and his wife nearly divorced. Dempsey quit “Grey’s,” eased up on racing, came home and began counseling. The next year his wife withdrew her petition.
Dempsey returned to work at a slower pace, choosing series with much lighter episode orders than he had on “Grey’s.” He also looked for more sinister roles, part of a deliberate reinvention.
“I have a dark side to my nature,” he said. “I just hadn’t been able to express it.”
Clyde Phillips, the showrunner of “Dexter: Original Sin,” saw something like this. He cast Dempsey as the show’s unexpected villain, weaponizing his charm.
“There is a non-McDreamy part of Patrick Dempsey,” he said in a recent interview. “Because he’s so appealing, when he turns out to be a bad guy, that is a wonderful surprise to the audience.”
Dempsey saw the “Dexter” role as a potential calling card, proof that he could take on more challenging parts. It is what interested the makers of “Memory of a Killer,” said Michael Thorn, the president of Fox Television Network.
“We understood how fully he could transform into someone far more unsettling — a chilling and complex presence,” he wrote in an email. Fox offered him the lead.
Dempsey was wary of taking on another network show, skeptical of the schedule and the constraints around language and violence. But he liked the scripts and the character. “I’m getting away from the softness of McDreamy,” he said. Once the creators guaranteed him a relatively short 10-episode first season, he agreed to take it on.
Though Dempsey plays only one role, it is effectively two roles. Angelo lives a quiet life as a salesman in a puffy vest, leaving flowers at his wife’s grave, cooking dinner for his pregnant daughter. But when his handler, Dutch (Michael Imperioli), gives him an assignment, he changes into a bespoke suit, trades his clunky Volkswagen for a Porsche and offs three men in a Chinese restaurant bathroom before the chorus of “Crimson and Clover” finishes. When Angelo begins to suspect that he is experiencing the onset of dementia and must conceal it, that’s another part to play.
“You never quite know what an actor is capable of,” said Aaron Zelman, one of the showrunners. “To see him get scary is really fun, to see him go to a more emotional place.”
Dempsey hasn’t played all of these colors onscreen before, but Imperioli wasn’t surprised to find him a deft and precise actor.
“His career has lasted as long as it has because he’s in control of his instrument and his emotions and his intentions,” Imperioli said.
Angelo’s ability to compartmentalize comes naturally to Dempsey, who recognizes himself as different people at home, at work, to his fans, on the track. He is comfortable with that. If the show is renewed, he would like to add more action sequences, more stunt driving. (“If it were up to him, there’d be a car chase in every episode,” Zelman said.) Mostly, he would like to feel that same completeness he experiences behind the wheel, that feeling that he is wholly present, wholly of use, more than a heartthrob.
“In racing, I can tell you specific moments where I achieved exactly what I wanted to achieve,” he said. “I haven’t had that fully yet as an actor.”
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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