Ellen Pompeo Says Roles Outside Grey’s Anatomy Have to Be ‘Rich’ So Fans Don’t ‘Work Too Hard to Not See Meredith Grey’

Ellen Pompeo knows she will need to find just the right role for her fans to accept seeing her outside the halls of Grey Sloan Memorial.

The Grey’s Anatomy star, 55, scaled back her role as Dr. Meredith Grey in 2022 after playing the beloved doctor since the premiere of the ABC medical drama in 2005. She then took a dramatic turn by starring in Hulu’s limited series Good American Family, which chronicled the true-crime story of Natalia Grace.

As for what the actress will do next, the actress told Deadline, “I just hope that I get an opportunity to play another interesting character.”

“I don’t have anything lined up yet, and I am reading things,” she explained. “I think what was fun about this is the opportunity to really play a character — voice, physical movements, wardrobe, all of it.”

Pompeo hopes that by taking on a dramatically different character from her role on Grey’s Anatomy that it “helps my audience believe me as something else.”

“I have to help them out of this hole that I dug us all in, this glorious hole of Meredith Grey,” she said, calling it her “responsibility.”

“I can’t just expect people to see me as anything else that I want,” she shared. “So I’m hoping for another rich character that I can kind of disappear into and make it easy for the audience to believe me as that character, not make them work too hard to not see Meredith Grey.”

No matter what role Pompeo takes next, fans shouldn’t expect her to hang up her scrubs for good. She previously told El País that it “would make no sense, emotionally or financially” to leave the series, which was recently renewed for a 22nd season.

“The show was streamed more than a billion times in 2024. More than a billion times. The companies that own the show and stream the show make a lot of money from our images and our voices and our faces,” she said. “If I were to walk away completely, everybody gets to make money from my hard work for 20 years and I wouldn’t make any money.”

Pompeo continued, “To me, it doesn’t make any sense that everybody [else] gets to profit off of my hard work. And emotionally, the show means a lot to people. I want to have an attitude of gratitude toward the show.”

Pompeo appeared in only eight episodes of season 19 of Grey’s while Great American Family, and her character made the emotional decision to leave Seattle during that season. Despite her departure, Meredith was around again in season 20 and, in the latest installment, season 21, she is set to appear in at least seven episodes.

The evolution of Pompeo’s role in the series came after she negotiated a $20 million deal in 2017 that made her the highest-paid actress on TV, earning $575,000 per episode.

On an episode of Call Her Daddy in March, Pompeo looked back on the salary she was able to negotiate for herself as she told host Alex Cooper that she’d “asked” Grey’s creator Shonda Rhimes before she made any moves.

“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.”

Pompeo called herself the “Disney princess” of the long-running series as she affirmed, “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.”