Ellen Pompeo just spilled all the tea on Call Her Daddy, and honestly, it was a wild ride. From her epic salary battles to the most cringe-worthy moments on Grey’s Anatomy, Pompeo kept it real. Let’s dive into the juiciest bits:
1. Ellen Pompeo’s battle with pay parity
Imagine being the face of a show but not getting paid as much as your co-star. That was Ellen Pompeo’s reality when Grey’s Anatomy first started. She acknowledged that Patrick Dempsey (aka McDreamy) was more well-known back then, having done 13 pilots before her, but not without a side of deserved shade.
As she put it, “To be completely fair, the television game was so different then. He had done 13 pilots before me… Nothing personal to him, just in general, only a man can have 13 failed TV pilots and their quote keeps going up, right?
“But in all fairness, his quote was what it was. 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 that was harder to get.”
To be clear to all the haters out there she wasn’t salty about Dempsey’s earnings but frustrated that her worth wasn’t valued equally.
This fight wasn’t just about her; it was about setting a precedent for women in the industry.
“I wasn’t salty about him getting what he got. I was salty that they didn’t value me as much as they valued him, and they never will,” she said.
By 2018, she became the highest-paid actress in a drama series, raking in $20 million per season. She was just out here being a diva.
2. Not everyone was impressed by Ellen Pompeo’s $20 Million salary
When her $20 million salary became public in 2018, Pompeo faced some serious backlash. Her manager warned her, “Are you ready to be unpopular?”
She recalled, “I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ And he was like, ‘Well, I just don’t want you to think that everyone’s going to go in and cheer for you and clap for you and bow to you and think you’re the dopest thing ever, because there’s going to be a lot of people who are not happy for you.’”
Unfortunately it seems that Ellen’s manager was right It’s worth noting that around the time that Pompeo’s salary bumped up to $20M, two of her co-stars (Jessica Capshaw and Sarah Drew) were let go and Deadline ran with the false narrative that they were fired so their salaries could form Pompeo’s pay increase.
Deadline wrote, “The decision not to bring back Capshaw and Drew comes on the heels of the blockbuster new Pompeo pact that gave her a significant salary increase, paying her as much as $20 million a year.”
Pompeo quickly responded to the article via post on X (formerly Twitter) to set the record straight. “I’m a big girl @DEADLINE can take shots at me if they want but to the fans please don’t fall into that trap,” she wrote. “This is above my pay grade.”
3. Shonda Rhimes was apparently the ultimate boss
Pompeo had nothing but praise for Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes, especially when it came to balancing work and motherhood. Rhimes would ask, “How many days do you need off? What can we do for you? How do we make this easier for you?”
Pompeo also shared that she approached Rhimes when deciding to ask for her raise. “I asked Shonda first… I said to her, ‘I’m gonna go in and ask for this much. Are you cool with that?’ Just because I don’t wanna be disrespectful to her, I don’t wanna come off crazy, and I wanna let her know what moves I’m making, because I do respect her, I am grateful to her. And I do wanna make sure I’m moving in the right way. And she was like, ‘Yeah, no one’s gonna give it to you, you have to ask for it,’” she shared.
“Being raised in a mafia culture, I always want to pay respect to the people that deserve respect.”
TBH the whole mafia thing was kind of skimmed over, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
Anywho, Rhimes’ team was able to show Pompeo stats from the show’s impact, which prepared her to fight for her salary. “I see exactly how much Grey’s Anatomy makes for ABC/Disney. I get to see the number. It’s my face, it’s my voice. I’ve done so much work promoting the show all over the world for the past 20 years. I am the Disney princess of that franchise.”
Oh, I’m obsessed with this woman.
4. Ellen Pompeo on her most uncomfortable sex scene
Pompeo shared a cringe-worthy moment from her time on Grey’s Anatomy: a sex scene with T.R. Knight (George O’Malley) that was so awkward, they both cried during filming. The network even asked them to reshoot it due to “too much thrusting”. In fact, Pompeo has never watched that scene to this day.
“In your worst nightmare to have to do it one time, we had to reshoot that shit… I’ve never watched that scene. I’ve never seen it. 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. There was a lot of stuff that I didn’t want to do at the time,” she said.
5. Grey’s Anatomy impacted Ellen Pompeo’s marriage
Pompeo shared that her on-screen romance with Patrick Dempsey’s character, Derek Shepard impacted her personal life, particularly her relationship with husband Chris Ivery. The tabloids were harsh, focusing on Ivery’s past and race.
“I mean, Chris really never watched the show that helped. It was better for him. He knew just not to watch. I was with him before Grey’s, so Grey’s kinda came out of nowhere for us. And I just think we were on this crazy ride that we were just trying to hang on for dear life,” the actress explained.
“The part of it that was more intense for me, even more than that was back to the tabloid stuff of how they started attacking him and bringing up his past things and a record that he had and stuff that he did,” she said.
“And we don’t need to get into a whole racial breakdown here, but the truth is young black men in [America] aren’t given the same opportunities as everybody else. And a lot of people come from rough neighbourhoods. I came from a rough neighborhood. I did plenty of dirt when I was young. I won’t get into that here. But you know, the truth is publicly … the racial was really something that he never asked for.”
6. Ellen Pompeo did not want to be a ‘pick me’ girl
Any alive person would have heard the phrase “Pick me, choose me, love me”, either on Grey’s Anatomy or voicing many a TikTok aimed at roasting ‘pick me girls’ (girlies who seek male validation whilst insinuating that they are “not like other girls”). But apparently, Pompeo didn’t actually want to say the iconic line!
“You know, and Shonda’s credit, like she knew that was gonna pop. I was like, ‘Why would I do this? Why would I beg, why would I?’ And you know, you have to just suck it up and do it. And it ended up being, the biggest thing ever, the most iconic thing ever. So I’m not always the best judge of what’s gonna … and it’s not like it wasn’t gonna be good. I was just like, ‘I don’t wanna do that’,” she said.
Well there you have it, if Ellen Pompeo wasn’t already your diva, she sure as hell needs to be now. You can watch the full Call Her Daddy interview here:
Lead image: Call Her Daddy
