Sarah Drew says the biggest risk she ever took was becoming a mother, and she says fear nearly swallowed her before the child she and her husband, Peter Lanfer, were waiting for had even arrived. The 45-year-old Grey's Anatomy alum said she was about six months pregnant when panic attacks hit and she began worrying she would not be able to do the job well.

“I was worried I was going to screw up,” Drew said in a recent interview while promoting Lifetime's When I Said I Do. She said she feared she would not have the selflessness motherhood required and worried she might resent the demands that came with it. At the time, she and Lanfer were preparing to welcome their first child after a decade of marriage.

Drew said faith has always been the foundation of her life, but that did not make the pregnancy easier. She said she had become overwhelmed by anxiety and finally wrote to her father asking for advice, wisdom or Scripture that could help her fight the fear. He wrote back with Bible verses she says she has carried with her ever since.

What stayed with her most, she said, was his advice to use “aggressive gratitude.” Her father told her the best way to combat fear was to speak aloud the blessings God had given her, and he called it aggressive because gratitude does not always come easily at the start. Drew said that when a mind starts spiraling, it is often easier to focus on what is dark and frightening than on what is already good.

The conversation came as Drew promoted When I Said I Do, the Lifetime film inspired by Clint Black and Lisa Hartman Black's hit duet. In the movie, Drew plays Ali Corley, a widowed search-and-rescue K-9 handler who rebuilt her life and found love again after losing her husband on the job. The role gives her a character defined by loss, resilience and renewal, the same themes that have framed the story she shared about becoming a mother.

That parallel is part of what gives the interview its weight. Drew was starring in Grey's Anatomy at the time she was preparing for motherhood, and now she is returning to screens in a film built around second chances and recovery. When I Said I Do premieres Saturday, May 23, 2026, at 8 p.m., and will be available for streaming the next day.

The question now is not whether Drew can play a character who has been tested by grief. It is whether the same hard-won faith she described in her own life is what gives Ali Corley the kind of honesty viewers will recognize when the film arrives this weekend.