Ellen Pompeo Reflects on ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Tabloid Backlash, Reveals Her Most Uncomfortable Sex Scene

Ellen Pompeo is looking back on how her onscreen love story with Patrick Dempsey on Grey’s Anatomy impacted her personal life and the sex scene she describes as “uncomfortable and awkward.”

While appearing on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast on Wednesday, Pompeo reflected on the epic love story her character Meredith Grey had with Dempsey’s Derek Shepherd and how that impacted her husband, music producer Chris Ivery, at the time.

“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. She went on to recall backlash they began receiving from the tabloids, in particular with reports focusing on his past and race.

“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 this country aren’t given the same opportunities as everybody else. And a lot of people come from rough neighborhoods. 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.”

Pompeo and Ivery married in 2007 and share three children.

She continued, “And I felt, really, more bad about that, that I felt like the media was really mean to him and really biased because how dare this skinny, blonde, petite little woman be with this tall Black man? The visual of that, I think America wasn’t ready for that. The mail that I used to get, the racist, hateful, violent mail that ABC would get because of that.”

When later reflecting further on Grey’s, Pompeo explained why the sex scene between her character and her former co-star T.R. Knight during the second season was one of her least favorite memories on set. In the show, Meredith has a moment where she rebounds with George O’Malley, which was difficult to film for Pompeo and a scene she still has yet to watch to this day.

She explained, “This is crazy. T.R. and I are such good friends. And we had to do a love scene and we were both crying. We cried. We cried. And the scene was so uncomfortable and awkward and he didn’t wanna do that. I didn’t wanna do it. And when we filmed it, it was so bad.”

Pompeo recalled ABC Network saying “there was too much thrusting” in the scene which resulted in them having to re-film it. “In your worst nightmare to have to do it one time, we had to re-shoot that shit. We had to re-shoot it and do it twice,” she said. “By the way, I’ve never watched that scene. I’ve never seen it, but I don’t know how it was shot or covered or what the end, how it was edited, but I’m full on in tears, the whole entire scene. And those are real tears.”

The actress said that even though “there was a lot of stuff” that she “didn’t want do at the time” she also “didn’t wanna say, ‘Pick me, choose me, love me.’”

“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.’”

A staple of the long-running Shondaland drama — the production company is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year — Pompeo made headlines when she became the highest-paid actress in a TV drama when she signed a deal that would earn her $20 million a season. Pompeo, who was candid about her fight for equal pay in her 2018 Hollywood Reporter cover story, further reflected on Dempsey originally making more than her and how she argued to be paid the same at the time.

“To be completely fair, the television game was so different then, and he had done like 13 pilots before me. That was my first pilot I’d ever done and 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,” she said. “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. 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.”

She added, “I’m not saying he didn’t deserve that money, just being that I was the namesake of the show, I deserved the same and then that was harder to get, so 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 and that goes back to my earlier point of like, once you get to a certain level, you can advocate for other women on your platform or in your job, in your workplace.”

Prior to asking for money, Pompeo explained that she went to Rhimes to let her know her plans to do so. “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.’ And so once I got her blessing to go ahead and do what I wanted to do, then I said to my team, ‘I’m okay with that.’

“Being raised in a mafia culture, I always want to pay respect to the people that deserve respect,” she said.