Camilla Luddington Explains Why She Listened to Taylor Swift During Jo’s Domestic Abuse Story Line

Grey’s Anatomy star Camilla Luddington listened to Taylor Swift while filming her character’s domestic abuse story line.

“I listened to ‘Clean’ while I was doing [the] episode with Paul, her husband,” Luddington, 40, revealed on her and costar Jessica Capshaw’s “Call It What It Is” podcast on Monday, November 4. “It was like this song that just got me in this place.”

Luddington has starred as Jo Wilson on Grey’s Anatomy since 2012. In 2018, the medical drama showed Jo’s estranged husband, Paul (Matthew Morrison), make a return. It was later revealed that Paul was abusive and Jo had managed to escape him years prior.

“Clean” appeared on Swift’s 2014 album, 1989. In a 2015 interview with Elle, the pop star, 34, revealed that she wrote the song in London. “Someone I used to date — it hit me that I’d been in the same city as him for two weeks and I hadn’t thought about it,” she recalled. “When it did hit me, it was like, ‘Oh, I hope he’s doing well.’ And nothing else. … The first thought that came to my mind was, ‘I’m finally clean.’”

Luddington, for her part, previously praised the Grey’s writers room for handling Jo’s past sensitively.

“For me, the story line ended up being a long time coming for the character,” Luddington explained to Bustle in January 2018. “[Head writer] Krista Vernoff and the writers have done an amazing job just diving right into it. It was very painful and uncomfortable to read and then to play, but I definitely felt the weight of you know, potentially fans of the show watching who had experienced this before.”

Luddington noted to the outlet that she hoped that the story line “would help educate people who have misconceptions about what domestic violence is or looks like.”

Grey’s Anatomy, which has been airing on ABC since 2005, recently made headlines after the release of the docuseries Anatomy of Lies in October. The series detailed the life of Elisabeth Finch, who became a writer on Grey’s Anatomy in 2014 and deceived many people, including by faking cancer. In 2022, an exposé from Vanity Fair called her work into question with allegations that she had fabricated both her medical and personal history. She resigned from Grey’s that same year.

After the docuseries’ release, Luddington broke her silence on what she thought about Finch and the whole situation.

“It is scary when someone can lie so easily, so confidently, that you really cannot tell,” Luddington said on an episode of her and Capshaw’s podcast last month. “That’s where it gets very creepy, if I’m being honest. It’s hard because you do watch these documentaries on Dateline and you’re always — I’m like this, where I’m like, ‘I would’ve known. I would know that person’s lying.’ Then you have [an] experience where it basically feels like you’re in a Dateline documentary and you realize, ‘I did not know.’ I truly did not know.”

Luddington added that it “throws you for a loop because you feel like your own instinct on stuff is way off.”

“I don’t like having felt like someone like that was in our orbit, and not feeling like I sensed any of that, the truth, myself,” she noted. “It just is uncomfortable, and you know, none of it feels good. It just sucks to be part of the story. It’s uncomfortable to be part of the story.”