Amelia Shepherd to take eight-episode sabbatical, return in 2026

Amelia Shepherd announced she is stepping away from Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital after the show’s season 22 premiere death, and the actress who plays her will be off-screen for a stretch. In Thursday’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy, titled We Built This City and airing Oct. 16, the neurosurgeon told colleagues she was taking a sabbatical as the hospital continued to reel from a catastrophic explosion that killed pediatric surgeon Monica Beltran and left others severely injured. Production plans call for the character’s absence to span the next eight episodes, with a return scheduled in 2026.

The episode, the series’ 450th, focuses on staff coping with grief while managing a chaotic first day of surgical rotations amid ongoing repairs to the hospital. Meredith Grey and Maggie Pierce return to support Amelia as she struggles with guilt and trauma following the blast and the death of a close colleague. Maggie, played by Kelly McCreary, revealed she is pregnant via donor sperm, a development she has not yet shared with her ex-husband Winston Ndugu. Actor Anthony Hill, who appears as Winston, said the season will present “a lot of challenges for the people who survived the blast,”...