In 2018, Ellen Pompeo became one of the highest paid actors in television when she negotiated a huge salary increase for Grey’s Anatomy. It didn’t necessarily make her popular (“The people directly around me? It was quiet as a mouse on set that day,” she said on the Drew Barrymore Show), but she’s been preaching the importance of advocating for oneself and achieving financial security within the industry for years. Especially because she was infamously paid less than her male co-star, Patrick Dempsey, despite being the titular character of the medical drama.
On a new episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast, Pompeo once again decried the initial pay gap on Grey’s, noting that “in all fairness” Dempsey was more well known than her and had done more television pilots than she had—”Nothing personal to him, just in general, only a man can have 13 failed TV pilots and their quote keeps going up, right?” she said. Still, Dempsey “did deserve that money,” but “It’s just, being that I was the namesake of the show, I deserved the same and that was harder to get.” She explained, “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.”
It was only when Dempsey exited the series in 2015 when the network was forced to reevaluate Meredith Grey’s value, as she detailed in a 2018 essay about her salary battles. “They could always use him as leverage against me — ‘We don’t need you; we have Patrick’ — which they did for years. 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,” she wrote. “At one point, I asked for $5,000 more than him just on principle, because the show is Grey’s Anatomy and I’m Meredith Grey. They wouldn’t give it to me. And I could have walked away, so why didn’t I? 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.’”
With Dempsey out, Pompeo was empowered to negotiate for more—a lot more, so much that she had to deny that the firing of her co-stars Jessica Capshaw and Sarah Drew was due to her $20 million pay raise at the time. The very public acknowledgment of her salary put her in an uncomfortable position (though surely the money helped). Though Pompeo has since taken a step back from the show (and tried out another project, Good American Family), she’s still involved with the series as a producer even when she’s not on screen. “When you make a lot of money as a woman, let’s face it, you have power. So then, how can I take that power and do good with it? How can I amplify someone else? How can I help someone else? How can I lift up someone else who doesn’t sit in the position of privilege that I sit in?” she said on Call Her Daddy.
“I see exactly how much Grey’s Anatomy makes for ABC/Disney. I get to see the number. It’s my face, it’s my voice,” she added. “I’ve done so much work promoting the show all over the world for the past 20 years. I am the Disney princess of that franchise, so I have the data to back up. I know the show has generated this much money; I definitely deserve a percentage of that.”
