While Harry afforded Borelli a shot at a romantic lead out of the gate, the erudite Levi began his stint at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital rather inauspiciously, failing to catch his glasses before they slid off of his face and into a patient lying open on the table. About a year later, he starred in Freeform’s queer rom-com The Thing About Harry from director-writer Peter Paige. And I'm hoping that that shows in the finale.”īorelli, 31, joined ABC’s long-running medical drama in 2018, coming out publicly as his character’s gay storyline unfolded not long after. I think it’s good to see Levi angry a little bit.
“I was able to bring my own queerness into this finale, And I chose to have that opinion leak in a little bit to the character because it’s not all wonderful these rules have changed. Borelli can’t go into detail about the plot, but he hopes Levi’s story for the 400th episode will illuminate the hypocrisy of the blood ban for a wide audience. Grey’s Anatomy is notoriously mum about its episodes. “ exactly what we were just hitting on at the beginning of this with the new Supreme Court stuff,” he adds.Įllen Pompeo as Meredith and Jake Borelli as Levi in Season 17 “You're fine as long as you don't have sex, as long as you don't partake in sodomy, or if you don't get married,” Borelli says of conditional acceptance of gay and bi men. Texas (2003), which overturned anti-sodomy laws. Hodges (2015), the case that led to national marriage equality, and Lawrence v. Wade in which Justice Samuel Alito cited Obergefell v. He draws a through line from the Supreme Court’s leaked decision to overturn Roe v. “The fact that oh, now that we have a blood shortage, now, we need you, so we're going to change the rules to benefit us.” “In preparing for the episode and talking to people about this, I found that especially from the straight community, that there’s this idea that oh, well, the blood ban is now no longer a lifetime blood ban for gay men,” he adds. And we have come so far in terms of blood safety tests. “To think of that, as you have this poison blood, which is just not it's not scientifically accurate.
Borelli says the bigoted blood ban is not justified by science and that even the 90-day rule is “manipulative,” calling the partial step “insulting.” During the worst of COVID, that time frame was shortened to 90 days.
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In 2015, the FDA changed the lifetime ban on men who have sex with men to a requirement of a full year of abstinence before donating blood. The ban, which was put in place more than 35 years ago and barred men who have sex with men from donating blood, and the subsequent adjustments to it got Borelli so fired up that he pushed for some of his opinions to also filter into character’s point of view.
He shares that the story elided some barriers between him and his character. But for Borelli, a gay blood ban story that involves Levi in Grey’s Anatomy’s 18th season finale (also the show’s whopping 400th episode), is deeply personal. Toss in Levi’s breakup with his handsome doctor boyfriend Nico (Alex Landi) and his mom’s major health scare, and the young doc was primed for a meltdown this season that had him reckoning with leaving medicine altogether.īorelli, who says he’s grateful for the opportunity to portray Levi but adds it was tough to play out the COVID storylines almost in real time with the pain of the pandemic in the world, was already noticing parallels between his character’s burnout and a bit of his own. The beloved character, who came out as gay at the same time Jake Borelli, who portrays him, came out publicly, worked amid the trauma of early COVID-19 last season, and suffered full-on burnout after losing his first patient under the hospital’s new training method this season. It’s been a rough few years for Grey’s Anatomy resident Dr.