Ellen Pompeo on ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Patrick Dempsey Pay Disparity: ‘Only a Man Can Have 13 Failed TV Pilots and Their Quote Keeps Going Up’

Ellen Pompeo said she was “salty” at the beginning of “Grey’s Anatomy” when co-star Patrick Dempsey was paid more than her, even though the show was named after her character, Meredith Grey.

As she told Alex Cooper on the latest Call Her Daddy podcast Wednesday, the actress and producer resented the fact that, as the “namesake of the show,” she “deserved the same [pay] and then that was harder to get.”

However, she admitted that Dempsey, who had a number of films and TV credits under his belt at that point, was better known, while the ABC show was her very first TV pilot.

“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.

“To be completely fair, the television game was so different then. He had done 13 pilots before me,” she noted. “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.”

Dempsey’s character, Derek Shepherd, was written off the show in 2015. In 2018, Pompeo negotiated a $20 million salary for her lead role on the medical series.

She said she was nervous to ask for the raise, but added, “I am the Disney princess of that franchise. 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. 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 told Cooper.

Pompeo next stars in the Hulu series “Good American Family.”

The post Ellen Pompeo on ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Patrick Dempsey Pay Disparity: ‘Only a Man Can Have 13 Failed TV Pilots and Their Quote Keeps Going Up’ appeared first on TheWrap.