Ellen Pompeo is opening up about her current, massive salary for Grey’s Anatomy and how she felt about making less than co-star Patrick Dempsey when the show first started.
The actress chatted about money during an appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast while promoting her new Hulu series Good American Family. (See photos in the gallery of Ellen at the show’s SAG-AFTRA Foundation Conversations event on March 17 in New York City)
Ellen said that it was her to accept that she earned less than Patrick when she signed on for the pilot, but that she understood at the time why he was making more money.
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“To be completely fair, the television game was so different then. He had done 13 pilots before me…” Ellen said on the podcast. “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.”
She added, “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.”
Ellen felt that as the title character, she “deserved the same and then 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,” she said.
Back in 2018, Ellen renegotiated her contract to earn $20 million per year on Grey’s Anatomy, including a salary of $575,000 per episode for a 24 episode season and an addition $6 to $7 million in extra value from a signing bonus and backend points.
“I asked Shonda first,” she said about talking to the show’s creator before asking for more money. “She doesn’t really have much to do with that stuff, it’s business affairs and whatever but I said to her, ‘I’m going to go in and ask for this much, are you cool with that?’ Just because I don’t want to be disrespectful to her, I don’t want to come off crazy and I want to let her know what moves I’m making because I do respect her. I am grateful to her.”
“I am the Disney princess of that franchise,” Ellen added. “I have this sort of data to back [it] up, I know the show generated this much money I definitely deserve a percentage of that,” she said. “I definitely deserve a percentage of that. I advocate for women always fighting for themselves because most likely they are getting undervalued compared to what they’re offering men,” she added.
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