Ellen Pompeo
speaker
140 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Ellen Pompeo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I should stay on this track. Why are you trying to derail me and put me over here? And my agent said, well, it's just a TV pilot and these things never go. So you can make a bunch of money with the TV pilot and then you'll be unemployed again in exactly 42 days. So I just did it, not knowing. And then the pilot got picked up and then we went back to shoot season one.
I had lunch with Shonda at RIP Barney's. Remember Barney's? Oh, yeah. I had lunch with her. They said, we want you to go meet this person. And to be honest, it was called the Untitled Shonda Rhimes Project at that point. I hadn't been reading any scripts that I would have been the main character. I was always the girlfriend person.
You know, I was some side chick down an alley in one scene in these great movies. You know what I mean? There was nothing for me to really do. But because I had a hard-on for the director or, you know, it's this director and this big movie star is in it and, you know, whatever. And listen, some of those movies are great.
I was in Catch Me If You Can with Leo and like Spielberg directed that and that was amazing. And I love those guys and I'm so grateful for that opportunity. So not to diss all of it, but I didn't have much to do in those movies.
And Shonda's script was really the first thing that was like, oh, you're the center, you're the lead, and you're playing a surgeon, a smart character, a working woman who's trying to figure it out. And I was like, wow. who is this woman? And then I went and met her and had lunch and I loved her. I mean, it's pretty right when you speak to her right away, it's obvious how smart she is.
Her best quality as a boss, that's so easy to answer. When you tell her you're pregnant or you're having a baby or She literally like sounds the bell, the confetti comes down. How many days do you need off? What can we do for you? How do we make this easier for you? How do we get you paid and keep your job? Like you were going to write your scenes and you only have to work one day a week.
She's extraordinary in that way. Back to my earlier point of being able to have this amazing home life. Shonda is a big family person. She has a big family herself. She's always with her parents and her sisters, and she really celebrates women going on a fertility journey, whether biological, non-biological. I had my second two children via surrogate.
She's just a really big supporter of women being able to work and have families. I don't think there's many people in this town who do that.
100%.
But people who judge that and make those very ignorant comments, they lack wisdom and they lack intuition and they lack magic. And Shonda is magic. We know that. Yeah, we do. And the truth is, and she has even famously said this, At work, I'm not 100% at work when I have kids at home. I'm absolutely not. You cannot be a mother and have children and give 100% to your job. You can't.
Because there's a part of you that's somewhere else. You split into different pieces. You're no longer just you. You split into different pieces. And you know what that does? What? It makes you more soulful. It makes you richer. It makes you funnier. It makes you feel more. It makes you more empathetic. It makes you angrier.
It gives you this range of emotions that you can't even imagine having without this person. You will be...
yourself times a thousand you will just be a better version of yourself and it doesn't matter that you can't give a hundred percent to this because by the way as women we evolve anyway and you're gonna whether you I'm not saying kids is the only path plenty of people don't want to have kids and that's great for them but if that's something that you want that's only gonna make you better and
You know, you're going to morph into – you'll morph into that person who part of your being is a mother. And that's only a plus.
I definitely wasn't this confident, but it was more of my husband really wanted to have a child. It wasn't really – because I had a complicated sort of sad childhood, childhood to me, I didn't have any sort of fond memories of children. And I wasn't – I didn't feel any maternal anything really because I didn't have a mother. Or I had one, but she passed away. Okay.
I was going to say, do you mind me asking just a little bit about your childhood?
She passed away of an accidental overdose when I was four. But so, you know, I have all these fond memories of childhood and dying to be a mother and all of that was really my husband who said, I really want to have a daughter and I want to name her Stella. And I was like, you – You know, you, I don't know, you kind of should have asked me this before we got married because I don't know.
I honestly, I've worked since, you know, 14 years old. I love working. And I didn't really ever think about it. I just loved working every day, loved going to work. And he was like, you really don't want to have a kid? And I was like, what? Oh, no. And then he was like, just one? And I was like, oh, no. And then I was like, oh, okay.
And then I started having – like he forced me to sort of think about it more seriously. And then I thought, you know, you think all the things. Like what if I have a kid and then I don't like it? Like you can't send it back. Like what happens? And then I'm like, but a lot of people have kids and they're like obsessed with them. So like maybe something happens and maybe they really do like them.
And then I thought, well, you know, I'm 38 years old and if I don't do it, I won't ever be able to. And then if I don't really like the kid or like being a mother, I'll just have the one, right? I was like, I don't have to do it again and I'll just deal with the one. So we did it. And then, of course, you know, my heart broke open and it changed my life forever.
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