Ellen Pompeo addresses Patrick Dempsey’s major pay difference on Grey’s Anatomy as she reveals real reason she was ‘salty’

Ellen Pompeo has spoken out about the real reason she felt ‘salty’ about the major pay difference between her salary on Grey’s Anatomy and that of male co-stat Patrick Dempsey, and her answer may surprise you.

Pompeo played lead role Meredith Grey for 19 seasons until she left the show as a series regular in 2023, occasionally reappearing for various appearances or voiceovers.

In 2018, she chose to renegotiate her salary after finding out that Dempsey – who played love interest Derek Shepherd – was being paid vastly more than her, eventually managing to bag herself a $20 million fee.

At the time, her manager had told her: “Are you ready to be unpopular?”

Indeed, she found the world didn’t congratulate her in the way she may have hoped, but knows it was important that she spoke up.

Pompeo found out that she was on much less than Dempsey (ABC)

Speaking about her time on the show on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Pompeo discussed the feelings that instigated that change, stressing that it wasn’t a case of Dempsey not deserving the cash as many may have assumed.

“To be completely fair, the television game was so different then,” she said. “And he had done, like, 13 pilots before me – that was my first pilot I had ever done.”

Pompeo continued: “So if you’re done 13 TV pilots – and nothing personal to him, but just in general – only a man can have 13 failed TV pilots and their quote still keeps going up, right?

“But in all fairness, his quote was what it was. 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 – I'm not saying he didn’t deserve that money. It just, being that I was the namesake of the show, I deserved the same, and then that was harder to get.”

Pompeo opened up about her salary negotiations in a new podcast episode (YouTube/Call Her Daddy)

The actor then reiterated: “I wasn’t salty about him getting what he got, I was salty that they didn’t value me as much as they valued him.

“And they never will, and that goes back to my earlier point of once you get to a certain level, you can advocate for other women on your platform or in your job, in your workplace.

“If you know that you’re getting this much and all the other women are well beneath you, you can’t just be okay with that. You can’t just be like, ‘Yes, I’m winning! Cool, let’s go!’ No, you really do have a responsibility to look and see what everybody else is making and use your power to say, ‘Listen, I appreciate what I got, this is amazing, but I happen to notice this.’

“And I really think that all the women deserve a bump.”

Asked if it was ‘tough’ to raise the hard questions, Pompeo replied: “I have some people-pleasing element that I think all of us have – well, not everybody, but a lot of people, I definitely have it,” she explained.

“Yeah, it’s not easy.”