Ellen Pompeo is never one to shy away from speaking about her time on Grey’s Anatomy, even revealing why she decided to stay on the show for as long as she has.
Appearing on Dax Shepard’s podcast Armchair Expert, Pompeo opened up about how empowered she felt after Patrick Dempsey left the show in 2015, feeling that she “had something to prove.”
She explained, “They had put that in my head for so long, that I was no good without him.” But instead of letting that discourage her, Pompeo said, “I had to rewrite the ending of that story and, say, well, ‘Who’s right? Am I actually good without him?’ I had to take over that script and rewrite that story and prove to myself that they were wrong.”
“I was just so beat down and meant to feel like they could do the show without me,” she admitted. “Patrick Dempsey leaving the show was that for me. I was like, ‘Oh, I have a window here, now how are they going to tell me they don’t need me? You don’t have him, so you can’t use him against me.'”
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter from 2018, Pompeo previously opened up about her experience on-set while Dempsey was on the show, admitting that they would “always use him as leverage against me—‘We don’t need you; we have Patrick’—which they did for years.”
She added, “I don’t know if they also did that to him, because he and I never discussed our deals. There were many times where I reached out about joining together to negotiate, but he was never interested in that.”
And when it comes to her future on Grey’s Anatomy, despite being one of the highest-earning actresses on TV, Pompeo revealed to Shepard that she would like to leave the show, sooner rather than later.
“I do not want to be the grapes dying on the vine,” she said. “Already to watch myself age from 33 to 50 now onscreen, that’s not so fun. Because you really see it because I’m in the same clothes, I’m in the same character. The way I see myself ageing, that’s a motherf**ker.”
“But certainly I think to dip out sooner rather than later, at this point, having done what we’ve done, to leave when the show is still on top, is definitely a goal. I’m not trying to stay on the show forever,” she continued.
“No way. The truth is, if I get too aggravated and I’m no longer grateful there, I should not be there.”
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