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Ellen Pompeo has reflected on one of her most difficult moments filming Grey's Anatomy, revealing that a particular sex scene left her and her co-star, T.R. Knight, in tears.
Speaking on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Pompeo shared that filming the season two love scene between her character, Meredith Grey, and Knight's George O'Malley was an emotional and uncomfortable experience for both actors. "T.R. and I are such good friends," she said. "And we had to do a love scene, and we were both crying. We cried."
The scene, which takes place in episode 19 of season two, sees a heartbroken Meredith impulsively sleep with George, unaware of how much it means to him. However, mid-intimacy, she begins sobbing, leading George to storm out. Pompeo recalled, "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."
What made it worse, she revealed, was that the network intervened, saying the scene contained "too much thrusting." This led to a dreaded reshoot. "In your worst nightmare, to have to do it one time, we had to reshoot that s–t. We had to re-shoot it and do it twice," she said. Nearly two decades later, Pompeo admitted she has never watched the scene. "I've never seen it," she said. "But I'm full-on in tears, the whole entire scene. And those are real tears."
Beyond her acting experiences, Pompeo also opened up about her battle for equal pay on Grey's Anatomy. She explained that despite being the face of the show, her co-star Patrick Dempsey was initially paid more than her. "To be completely fair, the television game was so different then. He had done 13 pilots before me," she said. "Nothing personal to him, just in general, only a man can have 13 failed TV pilots and their quote keeps going up, right?"
While acknowledging Dempsey's higher profile at the time, Pompeo felt undervalued. "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." In 2018, she became the highest-paid actress in a TV drama, earning $20 million per season.
After stepping away from Grey's Anatomy, Pompeo has shifted her focus to new projects, including Hulu's Good American Family, where she plays the adoptive mother of Ukrainian-born orphan Natalia Grace. Reflecting on her departure, she said, "I really just felt like an animal at the zoo. I'm a big believer in destiny. I thought, if there's something else I'm meant to do, it's gonna find me. But I know I have to leave this."
