Ellen Pompeo never intended to be known only as Meredith Grey. But after 20 years on the ABC primetime soap Grey’s Anatomy, it became increasingly challenging for Pompeo to find others who shared that point of view.
“Nobody was really interested in being the one that would greenlight something that would give me a reason to get off of Grey’s,” Pompeo tells me with the kind of characteristic frankness one might expect from an actress who has openly poked at Hollywood third rails like pay disparity. An avowed fan of spy thrillers like The Bourne Identity, Pompeo once thought that kind of vehicle would help people remember she can play a character outside of the hospital setting.
FAMILY LAW “It’s a pretty cool way to make a living,” Pompeo says to me about Good American Family’s ability to toy with its audience.
Instead, she wound up facing an entirely different challenge, starring as Kristine Barnett in Hulu’s limited series Good American Family. Based on the complex, heartbreaking true story of Natalia Grace, a Ukrainian orphan born with a rare form of dwarfism who was adopted by Barnett and her husband in 2010, Good American Family offers Pompeo a distinctive kind of transformation. In the series’ first half, Kristine is presented as the protagonist, a woman trying to do good but who’s overwhelmed by the disruptive girl she’s adopted — whom she believes might not be a little girl at all. But in the second half, the series turns the tables and shows the story more from Natalia’s perspective, putting Kristine’s selfishness on full display. “You gotta do things that scare you. And this definitely scared me,” Pompeo says.
The entire purpose of the show, Pompeo adds, was “to ask the audience to look at themselves and question why they believe what they believe.” As an executive producer, Pompeo paid attention to the uptick in social media attention after the show’s fifth episode, the first to tell the story from Natalia Grace’s perspective. “It’s like so many people had thought they knew exactly what show we were,” she says. “And then it literally flipped the script in episode five. The opportunity to get that through art, to have people question their biases or their mindset — it’s a pretty cool way to make a living, I think.”
On this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, Pompeo tells me about how she brought her years of experience on television to serving as an executive producer on Good American Family, a role she says can be as simple as just going around set and asking the actors what they need. She also talks about how she’s watched some sets become more inclusive over time, how she’s learned to use her voice, and how she pushed for Hulu to market Good American Family overseas, where, it turns out, audiences were also eager to see Meredith Grey doing something totally new.
