Ellen Pompeo is looking back at her feelings after learning that her former Grey’s Anatomy costar Patrick Dempsey was initially paid more than her.
via: Deadline
While appearing on Call Her Daddy, Pompeo acknowledges that when the drama series started, Dempsey was more well-known than her, but her character’s name was on the show.
“To be completely fair, the television game was so different then. He had done 13 pilots before me,” Pompeo said. “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 continued, “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. 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.”
In 2018, Pompeo became the highest-paid actress in a drama series, making $20M a season.
“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 added.
Pompeo noted that her fight for pay parity came when she reached a certain point in her career where she felt like this battle was for herself and all the other women coming up behind her.
“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 said. “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.”
As her comments at Dempsey went viral online, Pompeo came in for fierce criticism on Twitter, where one user lamented that 'she really turned bitter' and another sighed that she was 'another martyr…'
Watch the full interview below.
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