Bridget Jones's Baby: Patrick Dempsey talks TV doctors ad

By the time he left Grey’s Anatomy, Patrick Dempsey was more than ready to move on from his career-defining role. It took just one year, a good cause, and a legendary comic actor to convince him to throw on the baggy white coat a year later.

Dempsey and his esteemed colleagues in fictional medicine — Lisa Edelstein (House), Donald Faison (Scrubs), and Noah Wyle (ER) — linked up to create an advertisement for Cigna, a health insurance company, wherein the fake doctors encouraged people to sign up to see real ones. Everyone fell into place once M*A*S*H star Alan Alda signed on, according to Dempsey.

“Certainly spending time with Alan — to play a scene with him? That was pretty remarkable,” he told EW editor Henry Goldblatt during an exclusive EW Radio town hall ahead of Bridget Jones’s Baby, an excerpt from which you can hear below. Dempsey was on board with the message of the ad — pushing people to develop relationships with their doctors and seek regular treatment — which aligned with the Dempsey Center in Lewiston, Maine, he helped start.

The SiriusXM town hall with Dempsey and Renée Zellweger will premiere on Friday at 2 p.m. ET and play throughout the weekend on EW Radio (ch. 105), and anytime on the SiriusXM app.

Bridget Jones’s Baby opens Friday. Watch the ad below.