Ellen Pompeo can’t take it anymore: “Close Grey’s Anatomy”

Ellen Pompeo belongs to that category of actors that could be defined – with a little technical jargon – “miraculous”. They are, in practice, artists (perhaps even gifted with talent) completely ignored by any insider, but then suddenly someone gives them a chance in a project that is apparently marginal, small, irrelevant. Due to a series of fortuitous circumstances, however, that work becomes the title of the moment and the bank account of the aforementioned actor rises to almost bursting, if ever it were possible.

52-year-old Ellen Pompeo is well acquainted with this story, whom TV’s King Midas Shonda Rhimes touched upon with the role of Meredith Gray in the series – initially stopgap mid-season schedules – Grey’s Anatomy (Season 18 is currently available on Disney +, with new episodes arriving in January). And today, after twenty years, we are all still here talking about it.

In the ranking of Forbes of the highest paid actresses of the small screen in 2020, Pompeo has earned the eighth place, with a fortune of 19 million and a contract renewed in 2017 that earns her a record $ 550,000 for each episode of the series, plus $ 6 million a year for earnings from airing in other countries around the world.

At this point, however, Dr. Gray’s interpreter has more than enough. That’s why he’s already dedicating himself to something else, like his company Betr Remedies (a start-up that works with non-profit organizations to avoid wasting unused medicines but with a prescription), and during an interview with Insider stated that he is carrying out a kind of crusade to end the series: “I’m concentrating – his words – in an attempt to convince everyone that it should end”. Colleagues, with less rich bank accounts, resist (understandably). “I feel the naive one who keeps wondering, ‘What stories are we going to tell?’ And everyone else says, ‘Who cares, Ellen? We are making millions upon millions of dollars. ‘”

The actress says it as if she really didn’t care about all that money, as if in the past he had not renegotiated the contract until exhaustion for a more advantageous amount, even at the cost of closing the series. Not that it is condemned, of course: it pursues its own interests in a field that is after all a business (entertainment, but still a business). But such statements hint that she’s the only one who cares about the series’ high artistic end while everyone else focuses on vile money. She may not be the patron saint of consistency, but she has the blatant luck to still be loved by the medical drama audience and, at least as long as it lasts, she will have the knife – indeed the scalpel – on the side of the handle.