For more than two decades, Ellen Pompeo has been the Disney princess of her own franchise. As the namesake protagonist of Shonda Rhimes’ venerable ABC medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy,” Pompeo’s Meredith Grey has transformed from a wide-eyed intern looking to follow in her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother’s footsteps into a superstar surgeon and clinical researcher — all while enduring enough trauma to last multiple lifetimes in the process.
Pompeo will cement her status as one of the defining TV actors of the 21st century with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on April 29. An outspoken advocate for gender and racial equity, Pompeo says she’s never relished being the center of attention.
“I find it a little bit embarrassing, but at the same time, I know it’s a huge honor, so I’m grateful,” Pompeo tells Variety. As a Hollywood resident herself, she is “anxious” to see where her star will be and knows just how important it is to keep these traditions alive in an industry town that has lost some of its vitality.
Pompeo’s path to Hollywood stardom has been anything but conventional. Growing up in a blue-collar, mob-heavy Boston suburb, Pompeo had little exposure to arts, but she recalls losing herself in ’70s and ’80s movies. “I was enamored with Michelle Pfeiffer,” she says. Her aunt Ellen and uncle Jimmy would often bring her to Broadway shows as a welcome respite from her difficult childhood. (When Pompeo was 4, she lost her mother to an accidental drug overdose.)
After high school, she followed friends to Miami, where she recalls being “exposed to another environment and people pursuing their dreams” for the first time. She then moved to New York, where she took an acting class and was quickly scouted by an agent while bartending. Her commercial work for L’Oréal put her on the radar of casting directors, and she was cast as the love interest in such films as “Moonlight Mile,” “Old School” and Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can.” But much to her dismay, those supporting roles were largely whittled away in post-production.
“Grey’s Anatomy” Season 11
©ABC/Courtesy Everett Collection
Pompeo never expected to end up on a medical drama. But in 2004, when her movie career began to lull, her agent convinced her to sign on to lead a network TV pilot, if only to cover her rent. The show, against all odds, was picked up for an additional 12 episodes. A year later, following months of back-and-forth with skeptical executives, who had chosen to make the show a midseason replacement and even considered changing the title to “Complications,” “Grey’s” was an immediate hit, transforming its little-known creator and cast into household names.
“No matter where I go, there are so many people that come up to me, just generations and generations of people, that have gone into healthcare,” says Pompeo. But more than inspiring scores of viewers — especially women and people of color — to pursue medicine, she finds herself “overwhelmed” at the thought that the series has “provided comfort to people in their absolute worst moments.”
“I’ve had the chance to meet and shake hands and hug so many young people who are so sad,” Pompeo says of the profound connection fans have with Meredith, whose life has been marred by tragedy. She feels compelled to “try to stop and see people and see their pain and just look them in the eye and acknowledge them. If that brings people some comfort, then I guess that’s something I want to say I’m called to do. Every once in a while, a character comes along that moves people. It’s not often that comes along. I’m trying to embrace it with as much grace and gratitude as I can.”
Pompeo has remained frank about how her decision to stay on “Grey’s” — which, at one point, made her the highest-paid female actor on a primetime drama — has stemmed from her prioritizing financial security and a happy home life over chasing more challenging work over the age of 40. “As an actor, doing a show for so long is like a masterclass in being present and listening,” she says. The mundane, repetitive nature of broadcast TV may have left her feeling creatively restless, but Pompeo has learned to make peace with her choices.
A lot has been written about the early years of “Grey’s” — to rehash any of it now seems trite; you can easily find out what precipitated the departures of other cast members — but Pompeo remarks that the most popular seasons of the show were ultimately the most rife with drama on and off the screen. The unique pressure cooker of working 17-hour days for 10 months out of the year, being on a massive hit show and competing with other big personalities created an infamously toxic work culture behind the scenes. Following the departure of her co-lead Patrick Dempsey, who played Meredith’s neurosurgeon husband Derek Shepherd, in Season 11, Pompeo credits executive producer/director Debbie Allen for being the “den mother” who helped breathe new life into a show in desperate need of a culture change.
“The sad thing about it is the actors get a lot of flack for bad behavior, but what people don’t recognize is actors are very emotional people and very often come from weird situations,” Pompeo says. “Yes, it’s a dream job and it’s a privilege to be able to do, but it also does require adults on set to not just care about whether you’re on time and whether you know your lines and how you say them. You need someone to be the heart and the soul, to bring people together and to be a coach, in a way, with love. It’s unfortunate that more shows don’t put people in place to just be there, almost as a parent.”
Despite the behind-the-scenes turmoil on “Grey’s,” Pompeo remains “super grateful” to have lived through that experience: “I know I’m a better actor because I worked with that cast in the first 10 years. They’re all so extraordinary. I try my hardest to really remember all the good and not just remember the bad.”
Though her interest in playing Meredith may have waned, Pompeo’s investment in the quality of storytelling on “Grey’s” has never wavered — and she is refreshingly candid in her assessment of how the show has changed. She thinks the early seasons “looked so much better when we shot on film” than on digital. She is aware that “Grey’s” has evolved from being an addictive, character-driven drama into a plot-driven procedural, where “there’s a very obvious effort to manage comedy and drama.”
Disney
She has even found herself pushing back against new writing that seems at odds with the character that she and Rhimes had painstakingly crafted together.
“I don’t always have a say in the choices the character makes. And writers will initially service a plot before they might stop to think, ‘Would the Meredith Grey that [Ellen] built — would she make that choice?’ I recently had this happen this past season where I was deeply against a choice that Meredith was making,” Pompeo says, referring to a two-episode arc in which Meredith learns that a savvy doctor (played by Lena Waithe) lied about her wife’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis so that she could remain eligible for a life-saving liver transplant.
“My problem with that storyline was the Meredith Grey that I’ve created would have always been like, ‘I’m pissed that you lied, [but] let’s figure out how to game the system together to get you this fucking liver. Fuck the system. The system is broken,’” Pompeo explains. “Instead, Meredith chooses, for some reason, to be mad and snitch and tell UNOS and tell the board that she lied and that she shouldn’t get the liver — when Meredith has subverted the system for 20 years to do the right thing. She’s done free surgeries, whatever it takes, to actually heal and help people.”
Pompeo was so livid that she had an emotional outburst, but Waithe, as a writer and showrunner herself, helped her see that the plot was ultimately trying to service Meredith’s love interest, Dr. Nick Marsh (Scott Speedman). “I think at the end of the day, Meg [Marinis], who’s the showrunner, Debbie and Shonda all recognize that all of my outspokenness about the creative on the show is all out of a place of caring deeply about the show,” Pompeo says. “I see my job as trying to keep Shonda Rhimes’ legacy as good and solid as we can and the minute you stop caring or phoning it in or getting lazy, we’re not really doing what we’ve been paid to do.”
Pompeo confirms that, in addition to continuing to serve as an executive producer and doing the voiceovers in each episode, she has been contracted to appear in seven episodes of Season 22. Though she once confessed to Variety that the coronavirus season could very well have been the show’s last, Pompeo now knows the decision to end “Grey’s” will no longer be hers to make, contrary to what Rhimes has previously suggested: “It’s not like if I leave the show completely, they’re going to stop the show. The show is still massively successful.”
“Grey’s” is a multi-billion-dollar franchise for ABC and Disney, but Pompeo insists the actors still receive little-to-no residual payments on streaming.
“Them having the ability to use my voice, my likeness, my image, 47 billion minutes a year and not paying me a penny wouldn’t really feel great to me,” she says. “People don’t stream the last 10 years more than they stream the first 10 years. Most people stream the first 10 years the most, and there’s no residual structures for any of those writers, actors, directors. That, to me, is really shitty and really unfair. So, me being on the show a little bit and still getting to at least make money from them profiting off of us is more digestible for me. That’s why I stay on, to be honest.”
Since venturing into producing a decade ago, Pompeo has encountered a series of roadblocks. Many of the projects that she has sold through her Calamity Jane banner have languished at some point in development. Her close ties to her crowning achievement had also made it nearly impossible for anyone to see her as anything other than a familiar face in blue scrubs. “I don’t necessarily know that anyone’s going to greenlight anything that gives me the impetus to walk off of ‘Grey’s,’” she says. “No one wants to open that door for me.”
“Good American Family”
Disney
Pompeo voiced those frustrations to Disney Entertainment co-chair Dana Walden a few years ago. Walden, as the chairwoman at Walt Disney Television, agreed to let Pompeo scale back her involvement with “Grey’s” and then suggested she lead “Good American Family,” a Hulu limited series.
Pompeo recalls Walden telling her, “We can give you both things. If you stay on ‘Grey’s’ and stay invested in that show with us, then we will invest in you, and we will find an opportunity for you to be a producer and star in something [new] so you’re creatively fulfilled.” None of the other executives Pompeo had worked with in her 20-plus years at the company had thought to let her have her cake and eat it too.
Pompeo happily accepts that her legacy will forever be intertwined with “Grey’s,” but at 55, she still feels like a blue-collar worker with something to prove — not only to others, but also to herself. Playing a mother accused of child abuse in “Good American Family” has only reinvigorated her desire to play more complicated women.
“To keep a show on the air for 20 years, I have to be somewhat talented, but I’ve never been critically recognized,” says Pompeo, who earned an acting nod at the Golden Globes in 2007 but has never been nominated for an Emmy. “I think I’ve worked so hard and for so long that, yeah, I’d like a little bit of probably a pat on the back from someone to think I have some sort of talent.”