Ellen Pompeo received a warning about possible reactions before her $20 million “Grey’s Anatomy” salary became public in 2018.
“My manager at the time said something to me that literally hit me like a brick,” Pompeo recalled during an appearance on “Call Her Daddy.” “He was like, ‘Are you ready to be unpopular?’
“I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ And he was like, ‘Well, I just don’t want you to think that everyone’s going to go in and cheer for you and clap for you and bow to you and think you’re the dopest thing ever, because there’s going to be a lot of people who are not happy for you.’ And that had never occurred to me.”
Pompeo noted it can be “hard for people to celebrate other people,” especially when that person has “something that resembles something that they want.”
Pompeo’s $20 million salary was shared with the world in 2018. At the time, it was reported she would receive $575,000 per episode, a seven-figure signing bonus and more. She had been the lead character of ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy” since the show’s inception in 2005.
“Call Her Daddy” host Alexandra Cooper noted men don’t “experience this level of scrutiny” over money.
“It’s a lot, and it’s patriarchy, and it’s misogyny and that’s what it is,” Pompeo responded. “Sports players are celebrated for their contracts. Crazy contracts. Not saying they’re not worth it, but I mean, it’s OK for them to celebrate it.”
To combat the negativity, Pompeo just focuses on the work.
“I think what helps me is … to take myself out of it and stop thinking about myself and what people think of me and just focus on what I do best, which is the work,” she said.
“When you make a lot of money as a woman, let’s face it, you have power, right? 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? F— what people think of me. Who cares? You can’t control that. What you can do is use your power for good.”
The actress explained it wasn’t necessarily what people were saying about her contract, but what they weren’t saying after the salary reveal.
“I was ready for it because he made that comment to me, so what I saw was people who didn’t say anything,” the actress noted. “I got emails from all these people. I’m not going to name drop. I got a lot of emails that day when that story came out from amazing people. People who you’re like, ‘How’d you get my email?’ congratulating me. But then the ones who were quiet, who don’t say anything. And you see it, and you’re like, ‘OK.’
“But I don’t know what to say,” she added. “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”
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The 55-year-old actress negotiated the stunning contract after seeing the numbers for herself.
Pompeo noted she knew “exactly how much” the medical drama was making for ABC and specifically how much her character contributed to the success of “Grey’s Anatomy.”
“It’s my face, it’s my voice. I’ve done so much work promoting the show all over the world for the past 20 years,” she explained. “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.”
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Pompeo’s fight for her massive salary came after she received less money than Patrick Dempsey for the pilot episode despite Meredith Grey being the main character of the show.
“To be completely fair, the television game was so different then,” Pompeo said. “He had done 13 pilots before me. Nothing personal to him, just in general, only a man can have 13 failed TV pilots and their quote 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,” she conceded. “No one knew who I was. Everybody knew who he was, so he did deserve that money. I’m not saying he didn’t deserve that money. It’s just, being that I was the namesake of the show, I deserved the same and that was harder to get.
“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.”
