Ellen Pompeo Discussed the Grey’s Pay Gap on Call Her Daddy

McDreamy got McBodied by Meredith Grey. On Call Her Daddy, Ellen Pompeo discussed how hard it was to fight for pay parity with Patrick Dempsey on Grey’s Anatomy. “To be completely fair, the television game was so different then. He had done 13 pilots before me,” Pompeo told host Alex Cooper. “Nothing personal to him, just in general, only a man can have 13 failed TV pilots and their quote keeps going up, right?”

While still trying not to shade Dempsey too much, Pompeo explained that it was her titular role, and thus should have been her big paycheck. “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 said. “It’s just, being that I was the namesake of the show, I deserved the same and that was harder to get.” It’s true, Dempsey had been in lots of movies alongside his 13 failed pilots. Who could forget his turn as Detective Kincaid in Scream 3? But Ellen Pompeo had been the fun new girlfriend for Luke Wilson in Old School!

“I wasn’t salty about him getting what he got,” Pompeo told Cooper. “I was salty that they didn’t value me as much as they valued him, and they never will.” Eventually they did value her as much, if not more, than Dempsey. He left the show, and she became the highest-paid actress in a drama series. So there’s that.

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