After 19 seasons on TV’s longest-running prime-time medical drama, Ellen Pompeo quickly scrubbed out of the collection for a plum position on her new Hulu drama, Good American Family. “There’s a tremendous amount of pressure on me,” she beforehand advised Vanity Fair. “Why would anybody believe that I could do anything other than play Meredith Grey, myself included?”
To assist reintroduce herself, Pompeo stopped by Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast to discuss her almost twenty years on Grey’s Anatomy, a collection that’s been recognized to foster drama both onscreen and—as VF has extensively reported—behind the scenes.
Not all storylines on the hit ABC present are created equal, as Pompeo noticed firsthand whereas filming her character’s regrettable one-night stand with T.R. Knight’s George O’Malley. “T.R. and I are such good friends,” Pompeo advised Cooper through the March 19 episode, “and we had to do a love scene, and we were both crying.”
The season two encounter was “so uncomfortable and awkward,” she recalled. “He didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to do it. When we filmed it, it was so bad, and then the network said there was too much thrusting.” After receiving studio suggestions on the episode, Pompeo and Knight had to get again beneath the sheets. “In your worst nightmare, to have to do it one time—we had to reshoot that shit,” she mentioned. “We had to reshoot it and do it twice.”
To today, “I’ve never watched that scene,” mentioned Pompeo, who additionally serves as an government producer on Grey’s. “I don’t know how it was shot or covered or how it was edited, but I’m full-on in tears the whole entire scene, and those are real tears.”
Suffice it to say, Pompeo has greater than earned her $575,000-per-episode paycheck for the collection. But because the actor advised Cooper, she struggled to attain pay parity along with her costar and authentic onscreen love curiosity, Patrick Dempsey. “He had done, like, 13 pilots before me. That was my first pilot I had ever done,” Pompeo mentioned of their begin on the present, which debuted in 2005. “Back in those days—I don’t know if they still do this or not—you had a quote, and with every TV pilot you did, you got your quote, which was whatever it was. So if you’ve done 13 TV pilots—and, nothing personal to him, but just in general, only a man can have 13 failed TV pilots and their quote still keeps going up, right? But in all fairness, his quote was what it was.”
She added, “He was a bigger star than I was at that point. No one knew who I was. Everybody knew who he was. So he did deserve that money. I’m not saying he didn’t deserve that money. It’s just, being that I was the namesake of the show, I deserved the same. And then that was harder to get.”
