On a podcast this week, “Grey’s Anatomy” star Ellen Pompeo said — I’m paraphrasing — that she’d made a lot of money over the last 20 years. She also conceded that she drove Patrick Dempsey off the show because she wasn’t paid an equal amount to him.
Pompeo is nasty about Dempsey, saying he’d made 13 pilots before “Grey’s.” none of which was picked up.
The truth is, Dempsey had had a long career and was much better known in 2005 than Pompeo.
The crazy podcast interview was intended to promote her new Hulu show, which looks cheap and awful. I don’t know if it was done to help “Grey’s,” now heading to the chopping block after 21 seasons.
Last week, “Greys” dropped to an all time low — just 1,956,000 viewers. That was down 12.8% in total viewers, and 24% in the key demo.
Last night, the series bounced back a bit to 2.4 million fans.
It could be the podcast piqued interest in the dead on the vine series. Pompeo is unbearably arrogant, crowing about how much money she makes ($20 million a year), cursing like a sailor. She must be a thrill and a half to work with at this point. Hollywood has created a monster.
She actually said in her Hollywood Reporter interview this week: Can you be good 14 years later? Now, that’s a fuckin’ skill.
She is really crude in that interview and extremely unpleasant about actually talented, Oscar winning actresses: “I mean, Faye Dunaway is driving a fuckin’ Prius today. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a Prius, but my point is, she had no financial power.”
Pompeo was mad that Dempsey wouldn’t negotiate salary with her as a team. She really resented him to the point his character was mercilessly killed off. She reflects on his not helping her get more money:
“It’s my show; I’m the number one. I’m sure I felt what a lot of these other actresses feel: Why should I walk away from a great part because of a guy? You feel conflicted but then you figure, “I’m not going to let a guy drive me out of my own house.”
The interview is hilariously hubristic. Pompeo is a piece of work. Here’s a good moment:
What does it look like when he leaves the show? First, it looks like a ratings spike, and I had a nice chuckle about that. But the truth is, the ink wasn’t even dry on his exit papers before they rushed in a new guy. I was on vacation in Sicily, decompressing — it was a long working relationship and it was a tumultuous end and I needed a moment to just chill with some rosé — and they’re calling me, going, “What do you think of this guy?” “What do you think of this guy?” And they’re sending pictures. I was like, “Are you people fucking nuts? Why do you feel that you have to replace this person?” I couldn’t believe how fast the studio and the network felt like they had to get a penis in there.
Think of the very people who Pompeo tramped along the way. No just Dempsey, but Sandra Oh, Katherine Heigl, Justin Chambers, and so on. As fan favorite characters were killed off, sent away, dropped like bags of rocks into the ocean of unemployment, Pompeo just cackled. She’d won!
I watched the first season of “Greys” because I was stuck in a hotel room in Santa Maria, California covering Michael Jackson’s trial in 2005. Pompeo doesn’t seem to realize this is all luck for her. She’s not a great actress. Being the “Grey” in the title was a fluke. She says in the Hollywood Report that she was going to have a big movie career before the show took her off the market.
She actually claims that after appearing in the 2002 movie “Moonlight Mile,” a bomb financially and critically: “Sam Mendes, Steven Spielberg, Warren Beatty,” she rattles off the names. “They were all, ‘We were blown away by this performance’ and ‘You’re a superstar.’”
As we might say in Yiddish, Pompeo is a shanda. (Not a Shonda.)
