After 20 years, Grey’s Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo changes out of scrubs for another role

LOS ANGELES – At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ellen Pompeo stood in a room of Picassos, mostly in the Cubist style. She paused in front of a portrait of a woman in a blue dress. The eyes were at strange angles, the mouth tucked to one side. The nose was somehow everywhere.

The 55-year-old American actress tilted her head, trying to resolve the features into one coherent face. Then she gave up.

“There are three sides to every story,” she said. “Or six sides. Or nine. That is why art keeps us alive: Because everybody gets to see things their way, to make sense of them.”

For a long time, Pompeo’s Hollywood story has been a simple one, the perspective fixed. She modelled sporadically throughout her 20s, had a starring role in one film and smaller parts in others.

Since 2005, she has led the most popular medical show of the post-ER (1994 to 2009) era, ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy. She plays surgeon Meredith Grey, a sturdy moral centre in a fervid, ethically uncertain world.

In the intervening years, barring a handful of crossover episodes on Station 19 (2018 to 2024), a Grey’s sister show, Pompeo has amassed few other credits – a Doc McStuffins voice-over here, an appearance in a Taylor Swift music video there.

Boxed in by successs

It was not that she lacked artistic ambitions, but the Grey’s schedule was punishing and spending her brief hiatus making movies felt irresponsible, especially after she became a mother. She and her husband Chris Ivery, who works in marketing, have three children.

In 2022, she renegotiated her Grey’s contract, reducing the number of episodes she would appear in. This allowed for her first new substantive role in nearly two decades, as a flawed suburban supermum named Kristine Barnett in the limited series Good American Family, which is available on Disney+.

Based on the real case of an adoption gone very wrong, the drama is told from multiple perspectives. In some, Kristine is the wronged, imperiled victim. In others, she is the villain. As with a Picasso, the viewer is left to make sense of it all.

While Pompeo anticipates the 20th anniversary of Grey’s Anatomy, on March 27, she is reckoning with the picture of her own career – the choices she has made, the reasons for those choices. Having played one role for so long, she knows that her fans may resist seeing her in anything but scrubs.

Still, she felt she had to try on something new. “I’ve been dying for something else to do for years,” she said. “I’ve always wanted another opportunity. I finally have it. Yes, it’s scary. It might be the craziest, dumbest thing. But I’m going to trust in the universe.”

In person, Pompeo is sharp, sardonic and coolly wise. She is a woman who knows her own worth and expects others to know it too.

She has a reputation, entirely deserved, for brass, spunk and candour.

If she is a tough cookie, she is also a surprisingly philosophical one. When she was four, her mother died of an accidental overdose of prescription painkillers. So, while she spends a fair amount of time thinking about why her life has worked out the way it has, she does not often question it.

“It’s my fate,” she said repeatedly. “It’s my fate.”

This fate was not especially predictable. Growing up in a working-class Boston suburb, Pompeo did not have much exposure to the arts, though she loved movies – especially the Michelle Pfeiffer canon – and the aunt that she is named for took her to see Broadway musicals.

After high school, she followed friends to Miami and worked in bars. Offers of modelling took her to New York, though she knew she was not destined to model. She was too short, too mouthy.

Soon, she booked a sassy L’Oreal commercial, which brought her to the attention of casting directors and agents. Her first major role, in 2002, was in writer-director Brad Silberling’s weepie Moonlight Mile. Her reviews were strong, but the film underperformed.

There were other roles, a few substantial (2003’s Old School), but editing whittled others away to nothing.

Offered television pilots, she passed on them – she wanted to be a movie star, not a TV actress. But a couple of years after Moonlight Mile, she was broke. Her agent encouraged her to make the pilot for Grey’s Anatomy so that she could make her rent. Pilots almost never get picked up, he told her.

And then this one was. “There’s your fate,” Pompeo said.

For television producer Shonda Rhimes, creator of Grey’s, it also seemed like fate. Imagining an actress for Meredith, she asked her casting director to find her someone like the girl in Moonlight Mile. She was told she could have her.

“There was a spirit about her,” Rhimes said. “There’s a quality about her that welcomes you in.”

Grey’s, in turn, was almost too welcoming. The money was good, especially after the first season, when Pompeo stood up for herself and renegotiated her contract. “I gradually learnt through other women teaching me, Shonda Rhimes telling me, to ask for what I deserve,” she said.

While the hours were long, they were regular, and the show shot in Los Angeles, where she lived. Gradually, she gave up her movie dreams. Then she gave up hoping for an Emmy, even though she thinks she should have been nominated for a couple. “But it wasn’t my fate,” she said.

A decade in, Pompeo no longer found the show creatively fulfilling. She founded a production company, Calamity Jane, but failed to sell the projects she developed. She began to believe that she would never have another role.

After the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, she wondered if it might not be better to have no role at all. Financially secure but creatively frustrated, she thought about quitting Grey’s altogether.

“I couldn’t keep going,” she said. But she also could not picture the show going on without her.

Ms Dana Walden, who was then the chair for entertainment at Walt Disney Television – which owns the ABC network – heard her out. She allowed Pompeo to reduce her episodes by more than half. And she suggested that an upcoming project would be perfect for her: Good American Family.

The series is inspired by the real-life case of a Midwestern couple who adopted a young girl with a rare form of dwarfism and then left her on her own.

Getting Pompeo on board

At first, Pompeo was not sold on Good American Family, which hovers between fact and fiction as it offers multiple perspectives. (A hefty disclaimer at the start of each episode describes it as reflecting and dramatising conflicting points of view rather than arguing for a definitive truth.)

She has little appetite for true crime and worried that the story might come across as “a little tabloid-y”. And she did not want to play a character who in some versions of the narrative mistreats a child. What if her own children saw the show?

But her agent convinced her. Kristine was so different from Meredith that it would show audiences, instantly, that Pompeo was a real actress, not just a familiar face in blue scrubs.

Yet, that familiarity is a useful tool. It helps viewers to side with Kristine, at least at first.

Katie Robbins, the creator and co-showrunner of Good American Family, said: “We needed someone whom you trusted, whom you believed in and wanted to root for, whom you felt aligned with.”

Pompeo had that. Her approach to the role was similar to what she does on Grey’s. She tried to find the truth in each scene, to work hard, to treat the cast and crew fairly. She often mentors young women, in part because she could have used that mentorship when she was younger.

Imogen Faith Reid, the 27-year-old Britain-based actress who plays the adopted girl in Good American Family, appreciated that care. “She would remind me that I could always speak up and have a voice,” Reid said. “It was just so amazing to hear.” NYTIMES