Ellen Pompeo: The Telegraph Interview
The dark, back office of a Georgian house in Bloomsbury is an incongruous place to be interviewing Ellen Pompeo. But that's where The Telegraph (U.K.) tracked her down for the second of two exceptional interviews we've found featuring the Grey's Anatomy star this week.
Yes, it's a far cry from the sun-baked Los Angeles lot where Pompeo is usually to be found, in scrubs, as the title character in Grey's Anatomy.
Dr. Meredith Grey - brisk, vulnerable, self-destructive, talented - is a lead unlike any other on American television, and her gripping screen presence and romantic train wrecks hook 20 million viewers a week.
In its annual "Celebrity 100" power list, Forbes ranked Pompeo and her co-stars number 12, while the Desperate Housewives cast fell to 47.
Yet in Britain, where the drama is the main draw on the digital channel Living with reruns on Five, Ellen Pompeo is hardly a household name.
Male critics have sniffed at the 'vapid' scripts and 'mawkish' acting in the drama about five trainee surgeons at a Seattle hospital.
But Ellen Pompeo's portrayal of a woman totally competent in her work and an utter disaster in her relationships has forced even veteran Hollywood producers to examine how a lead wh's such a mess - prone to getting drunk in bars and picking up strangers - can prove so compelling.
The tabloids have focused on Pompeo's weight (she's supposedly anorexic), behavior on set (she's supposedly a diva) and, since her November engagement, the colorful past of her fiancé Chris Ivery, a record producer, and the size of the engagement ring he gave her.
This, a dazzling oblong diamond, has caused Ellen Pompeo so much angst that she is even now twisting it off her tiny hand.
'Completely garish, isn't it?' she asks. 'He got it in Beverly Hills and spent his entire life savings, which I could kill him for. I was very mad about it. Some days I really love it, and some days I just want to sell it and give the money to charity. All the magazines care about is the size. I think, "Oh, it's absolute rubbish and I'd like to throw the ring in the sewer."'
Continue reading The Telegraph's lengthy, revealing interview with Ellen Pompeo after the jump ...
'I know! How fortunate of me to sit here with this giant rock when there are babies in Africa fighting for their lives.' She has gone from making no money to making great money. How does that feel? 'I feel guilty.' She gives a high, truthful laugh of embarrassment. 'I feel guilty!'
Like so many Hollywood stars, Pompeo is small and fragile. Her hand, when I shake it, is like a bunch of twigs and her muscled arms are as tiny as a child's.
She is wearing a black sleeveless cotton dress over thin black leggings and Lanvin ballet flats, and in person looks completely different from on screen - younger and more innocent, a cross between Michelle Pfeiffer and Calista Flockhart.
Her long hair is healthy and red, her blue eyes have a tinge of green and she keeps almost constant eye contact in a way that is not at all uncomfortable.
Here on her an eight-week hiatus from Grey's Anatomy, she and Ivery are looking for a London flat to buy, before zipping on to Paris and Tokyo.
You feel that it is only now, at 37, that Pompeo's life is starting to make sense - Ivery's too, perhaps, following his three jail sentences, two for drug convictions, before they met. He now works scouting talent for the music producer Randy Jackson from American Idol.
Pompeo, meanwhile, is on her fourth season at Grey's Anatomy, of which she is the undoubted star (with great support from Patrick Dempsey and Sandra Oh from the film Sideways).
The drama has gathered Emmys and Golden Globes since it debuted on ABC in March 2005. Pompeo is paid $200,000 an episode, and her story seems to be a Cinderella tale of late success, even including a mother's death and a tricky stepmother.
She had a sad, difficult childhood as the last of six - she was eight years younger than her nearest sibling - in the blue-collar town of Everett, near Boston, and was four when her mother, Kathleen, died of an overdose of painkillers. Her first memory is of her siblings attempting to revive her.
The trauma in this vignette is hair-raising, and she admits, putting her hand to her throat, 'I had a tragedy as a child, obviously, my mother dying, and it sort of⦠I suppose I describe it as⦠it sort of left me with a broken heart.' But can you mend a broken heart? 'No, never completely.' Her voice lifts, childishly. 'But that's OK, because it makes me appreciate my life.' Had she found therapy useful with that? 'No, I think my job is therapeutic.
It was quite a tragic thing, all these children having no mother; it was quite difficult on my father,' she continues.
'And then he remarried shortly after my mother died, and, ah, much too soon. It was⦠quite a bad situation for all the children.' Why, what was her stepmother like? 'Oh, I'd rather not discuss that. So I would go off and stay with various people. I was always being shuffled around. Who could baby-sit me this time? So I would go for the summers and the weekends to my aunt Ellen, who I'm named after, and my uncle Jimmy on the Upper East Side of New York. My uncle Jimmy took me to the theatre. And another of my mother's sisters, Sister Maureen, was a nun and lived in a convent in the Bronx, and I would go stay there often, as well.'
Pompeo says, batting away sympathy, that those 'different experiences' gave her a lot to draw on in her acting. But she also concedes that, 'I was just completely confused. I knew I had a lot of people who loved me.
There were a lot of different types of people in my life, and I had all these brothers and sisters who were crazy hippy teenagers, smoking pot in the wild 1970s - rock 'n' roll - and I had my dear, dear grandparentsâ¦' Everyone, but no one? She pauses. 'I did⦠well, you know, I had everybody but the one person I really wanted.'
Her father, Joseph, a tobacco salesman, was a strong character. 'He intimidated everybody. He'd wait at the window and when they dropped me off in front of the house he'd fly out of the door and rip them out of the car by the neck,' she has said, alarmingly, of her teenage dates, but he also told her she could do anything she wanted in life.
What she wanted was to act. So the moment she turned 19 she made for Miami, where she got a job as a cocktail waitress.
Despite her fragile, feminine appearance, she was no pushover. 'I'd abuse the customers, yell and scream at them and make them wait. If they put money down on the bar and it wasn't enough, I'd go wait on someone else. Pretty soon there would be $20 on the bar,' she once told Playboy. I love that image of you at the bar, I tell her. 'Right!' She laughs with real amusement. 'Well, I don't know if you've seen The Departed, but Boston, my home town, is a corrupt place. I grew up in an Italian-Irish neighborhood, and there were Irish gangsters and Italian gangsters. It's very much like a modern-day Gangs of New York.'
After two years in Miami she went to New York. But her dream of becoming an actress still seemed 'such a grand thing. I felt so overwhelmed, you know, "How do I figure out how to go about this?"' She was also suffering profoundly from her childhood. 'It's as if the floor beneath you is⦠as if a board is always going to fall through.'
She was 25 when she got her first break; an acting agent approached her as she was working the bar at the SoHo Kitchen. The agent put Pompeo up for three adverts; she got all three. Then Pompeo landed a part opposite Jake Gyllenhaal in the 2002 film Moonlight Mile.
He, by chance, had come up to her in a car park three weeks previously and told her she was 'the most beautiful girl I've ever seen in my entire life'. For her the coincidence was life-changing. 'It sort of hit me that I was being guided,' she says. 'I had sort of spent my twenties up until then looking for some sign of my mother, you know, "Make the chandelier swing and show me that you're with me." And at that point I put my faith in the idea that life gives you signs and, whether it's my mother's spirit or not, I've had too many coincidences in my life for it to be normal.'
Another was the way she met Ivery. They had grown up two miles apart but met only in 2003 when a mutual friend introduced them at a Whole Foods shop in Los Angeles. 'I knew his background and I knew the circle in which he ran and I didn't want anything to do with it,' she admits. 'You think you want to get away from your past and be this completely different person. And then I run into him again two days later and by this time in my life I know that's no accident. I knew he was supposed to be in my life.' He had gone to jail briefly? 'Oh, yes, a couple of times. But most people I knew in Boston did. It was very common, which is why I had to get out.'
Something of Pompeo's childhood vulnerability comes off the pages of her previous interviews and you hope, before you meet her, that Ivery is good news. He drives her to work and visits the set most days; she says they do everything together. 'To know someone - the real them, not the reinvented Hollywood them, with all of their flaws and all of their past - that's a true relationship,' she says. 'I feel very lucky. It's very solid.'
I ask what she makes of her character's romantic travails in Grey's Anatomy.
'She has a complete lack of emotional intelligence,' she exclaims. 'I just want to smack some sense into her.' What would she advise her? 'Don't ever beg a man.' (She is referring to the scene where Meredith pleads with her married lover Derek to choose her.) 'He should be begging you!'
So what's next for Ellen Pompeo?
Halfway through a six-year lock-in for Grey's Anatomy, she and Ivery are now trying for children. Does their forthcoming wedding excite her?
'No, I'm not someone to stand on ceremony. That's why I have such a problem with the ring. It is a symbol. Just rather an extravagant one.' She gives another high laugh of embarrassment.
I say it must feel like it's all coming right. She smiles. 'I think so. A friend who I moved to Miami with when I was 16 or 17, he was photographing me back then and said, "You're going to make a great 40-year-old." I didn't know how to take that at 16 or 17, but I never forgot it. Now I feel like the older I get the more I am able to take on.'
Her publicist is mouthing that we have to finish. 'I love the architecture round here,' Pompeo says, getting up.
'It reminds me of my home town.' I catch sight of her in the next room as I leave. She looks different now, 17 again, a sprite, a slip of a thing, in her teenage black wardrobe.
'I took a sleeping pill last night, which I don't usually do, because my body is too little to take it, and this morning I was all over the place,' she exclaims. 'I could hardly manage to dress!'
August 20th, 2007 2:20 PM
Hm have a look at this pic: http://l.yimg.com/img.tv.yahoo.com/tv/us/img/site/71/20/0000037120_20070115235256.jpg
Everybody's smiling in a normal way, but she's trying to be the diva. And why?
Honestly, I love Grey's, I love Dempsey & the MerDer chemistry, but I don't think she's a great actress..I think Kate Walsh was much better! Just like Dempsey, Heigl, Knight, Oh!! So why the diva behavior? Because she's not that good...Ok, the show is about her, but it's a pity it's always about her and not about the other, better cast members..But ofcourse I'll keep on watching ;) !
August 20th, 2007 2:35 PM
Remember that movie "Being John Malkovich?" I wish I could do that with Ellen Pompeo. She is amazing..no... way better than amazing..she is.... astonishing, awe-inspiring, awesome, exciting, hair-raising, heart-stirring, impressive, magnificent, moving, overwhelming, spine-tingling, stunning, thrilling...just one day to see what the day in the life of Ellen Pompeo would be....
August 20th, 2007 2:35 PM
I have read several of her interviews and for some reason this didn't seem right. It seemed kind of morbid. I might of been reading it wrong but it just didn't seem like the Ellen were use to reading about.
August 20th, 2007 2:37 PM
I looked at the pic and she does look awkward but it seems as though she is turning around and they caught a bad angle..I could be wrong..I still love her no matter how much of a diva she is.
August 20th, 2007 3:33 PM
Um they caught her at a bad angle, because she's kind of turning when the picture was taken. I've never heard of being the diva, KH n the other hand yes but not EP.
However this isn't really the place to discuss who is a diva or not so why?
August 20th, 2007 3:59 PM
Non of ellen's co-stars have ever complained of her being a diva on set. We all know what the media can be like and how they can exaggerate things. I refuse to believe for a second that ellen is a diva and after reading both interviews, i love her even more.
August 20th, 2007 5:12 PM
Hmmm....... after reading some comments, i just felt i have to say something.
firstly, it is a well known fact that people either like you or hate you no matter what. However, its still not right to jugde a person from what the media say. Secondly, this interview doesnt sound right at all. Ellen, sounded like she is really missing her mum, which concerns me. She has never ever said much about her mum before, but she did now. People only miss their dead mum when they feel alone or scared. Thirdly, i watched a couple of GA co stars on set videos some months back and i particularly saw ellen playing around. One she was on T. R's back and the other she was laughing at what patrick dempsey was saying. That to me doesnt look like a diva behaviour. Also, ellen in almost all her interviews always said she is grateful for having a job and she loves the people she works with. Fourthly, i have never read any interviews were any of her co stars said something negative about her. But like i said, people will either love you or hate you no matter what. I know for a fact that ellen's fan(which is growing by the way) will continue to love her, while on the other hand, people who dont like her will never will no matter what she says or do.
August 20th, 2007 5:55 PM
i would absolutly love to spend the day with ellen. by the way she talks back in the day we were much alike. i used to bartend back when i was in college and i loved it. but it doesn't matter.. i really would just love to meet her.
August 20th, 2007 6:17 PM
Ellen Pompeo is the reason I watch Grey's Anatomy. Btw..her co stars have had nothing but nice things to say about her. How someone can make a judgement on her by a photograph is beyond me.
She brings a heart to the lead character. Every week that I watch I find myself really relating to her. Ellen is very much an everyday sort of person. Not someone who is WAY beyond what other woman can dream of being. Her being so down to hearth and natural is one of the reasons I think she has won over so many fans. I have never read one interview where a co star has said anything but the nicest words about her. Fans who have met her say the same.
Shonda Rhimes once said she knew right away that when she was casting Meredith, she wanted the actress from "Moonlight Mile" (Ellen) Rhimes also said out of all the characters Meredith is the most like herself. Well I have to say Meredith is like many people I know including myself. A very real understandable character portrayed by a wonderful actress.
August 20th, 2007 6:43 PM
Good stuff, why anyone will hate this woman is beyond me. She really really does love this chris guy doesnt she?
August 21st, 2007 1:34 AM
greylover you have many problems....
Walsh is better than Pompeo? Really!!! Walsh smile is natural??!! Really??? Oh face is natural?? Really?? You need a doctor.
August 21st, 2007 1:36 AM
Grey's have three divas: Walsh, Heigl and Oh.
August 21st, 2007 1:46 AM
You can never judge someone by a single photo, besides its an obvious wrong angle, and thats the same pic where in a few seconds T.R leans and kisses Ellens shoulder, its in all Golden Globe galleries. it's a Beautiful pic if you can find it and see it.
Ellen has a huge fan base for the reasons that are shown in this interview and the one before it. She's down to earth and you relate to her and the way her life turned out, the hardships she went through and how she worked really hard on getting where she is now. And whats amazing about her, is she kept a good head throughout it all. She is balanced down to earth loving, fan appreciative, which is vert important and appears to have one of the most possitive attitudes i've seen on a celebrity in a while. She is really like the gilr next door, or the friend you felt with.
More power to Ellen for being who she is and staying that way. She is an amazing person indeed.
August 21st, 2007 1:53 AM
Kate Walsh is the fake woman. She smiles in front of the camera. She's a needy but for many people she's the funny person when she isn't and then she can't act.
Sandra Oh and Katie are two divas also. You should talk with people who met them. Both are arrogants.
August 21st, 2007 1:55 AM
Ellen Pompeo is a jewel.
I met her some time back, and I can tell you she is the sweetest kindest cutest person, most down to earth actress and person. I fell inlove with her since moonlight mile and now Grey's anatomy. She does a brilliant job in making this character stand out on TV. She went through a lot in her life and came out in flying colors.
She is worth admiring in every sense of the word.
thanks for posting this interview.
August 21st, 2007 2:30 AM
My friends met her too. She's really sweet!
August 21st, 2007 5:08 AM
Calliope, I don't have any problem at all, don't overreact, seems like you are the one who needs a doctor. Ofcourse I don't know all these people, but my opinion was based on what I read on other forumstuff, and the punk'd video. Ofcourse I don't know her and I don't know what's true about the diva thing, it was just an opinion. So don't freak out, I don't hate her at all.
August 21st, 2007 8:06 AM
het david where did u meet ellen cause i am like truly obsessed with her and i ahve been trying to meet her since like season 1 of Grey's Anatomy so if you could please tell me how i could reach her it would be great !!!!! thanks
August 21st, 2007 8:28 AM
"my opinion was based on what I read on other forumstuff, and the punk'd video"
It's sad. You haven't an opinion but you believe in the lies of the others (you should believe in the opinions of Ellen fans too). No offence but you are a little immature. All mature people have a personal opinion.
August 21st, 2007 9:00 AM
i don't see how Ellen can be a diva. I've never met her, and probably never will, but she seems like a really sweet and caring person. I have to disagree with what David said. Ellen doesn't have to be sad or lonley to miss her dead mom. If my mom died, i'd be missing her everyday. She even said that her job is theraputic for her, which is a great way of coping. It sounds like her childhood wasn't easy, but she's really turned it around, which is great. I love how she's not like the some other actresses who obsess over weddings. She doesn't want anything big and she feels 'guilty' about the ring. I have a feeling that the media is going to do something about her wedding, but in my opinion, she is the farthest thing from a diva. That picture obviously wasn't the best one of hers, but she has a million others that can cover up that one.
August 21st, 2007 9:03 AM
What an amazing interview and article. I love how natural and human this woman is. She is a breathtaking lovely sweet person.
I can't but love her more...
Thanks for everything
August 21st, 2007 9:10 AM
Yes, my opinion was based on that vid, where I could see it with my own eyes, and yes, another forum where ppl from her neighbourhood were talking about her. My opinion is based on prejudices. I can't have a true opinion cause I don't know her in person :D Seems like you're a little frustrated. You should try to accept other people's opinions. And as I said, I'm not a hater, she's just not my favorite character.
August 21st, 2007 9:44 AM
to mcobsessed i totally agree with you her job is helping her cope and that is a wonderful way to cope with the loos of her mum!!!!!
August 21st, 2007 10:51 AM
"Yes, my opinion was based on that vid, where I could see it with my own eyes, and yes, another forum where ppl from her neighbourhood were talking about her. My opinion is based on prejudices. I can't have a true opinion cause I don't know her in person Seems like you're a little frustrated. You should try to accept other people's opinions. And as I said, I'm not a hater, she's just not my favorite character."
Frustrated?? Really??!!
I'm a GA fan and I support all cast members (I dislike only Walsh because she's fake. I know people who met her and she isn't like on tv).
I hate the people who bashing without a reason, people who said "I'm a MerDer fans but I hate Meredith or I hate Ellen". It's stupid and hypocrite.
Then you said "I can't have a true opinion"... Why you bashing her, if you haven't a true opinion?? I suppose you are a child because if you are an adult.. sadness
August 21st, 2007 11:00 AM
Calliope I agree with you.
greyslover you are free to dislike her but you don't know EP and I don't think you should insult her.
She was funny on Punk'd. It's hypocrite to judge her for that joke.