Ellen Pompeo wasn’t thrilled to be scrubbing into that sex scene.
The actress, 55, revealed why she wasn’t pleased when her character Meredith Grey and T.R. Knight’s George O’Malley had sex in Season 2 of “Grey’s Anatomy.”
“T.R. and I are such good friends and we had to do a love scene and we were both crying,” Pompeo recalled on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast on Wednesday.
“The scene was so uncomfortable and awkward. He didn’t want to do that, I didn’t want to do it. When we filmed it, it was so bad. And then the network said there was too much thrusting,” Pompeo said.
And therefore the co-stars had to redo the moment a second time.
“In your worst nightmare to have to do it one time, we had to reshoot that s–t…,” Pompeo added.
“I’ve never watched that scene. I’ve never seen it. I don’t know how it was shot or covered or how it was edited but I’m full-on in tears the whole entire scene and those are real tears. There was a lot of stuff that I didn’t want to do at the time.”
Season 2 of the drama ran from September 2005 to May 2006. The ABC hit show is currently in its 21st season.
The “Art Heist” alum also got candid about stepping back from her role as the lead on the medical drama.
Although she is still a supporting character and a producer, Pompeo felt it was time to move on in some capacity.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do. I just knew that I really couldn’t do ‘Grey’s’ anymore,” she told host Alex Cooper. “It was to the point where I really just felt like an animal at the zoo. I’m a big believer in destiny. I thought, if there’s something else I’m meant to do, it’s gonna find me. But I know I have to leave this.”
During her time on “Grey’s,” Pompeo made headlines for fighting to make equal pay.
Pompeo argued that she should make the same amount of money as her then co-star, Patrick Dempsey, who was her love interest on the show.
By 2018, she became the highest-paid actress in a television drama — bringing home $20 million per season.
“To be completely fair, the television game was so different then. He had done 13 pilots before me,” she shared, adding that the 59-year-old’s quote was much higher than her own. “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.”
Pompeo added, “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’s just, being that I was the namesake of the show, I deserved the same and that was harder to get.”
“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,” she said.
“Being raised in a mafia culture, I always want to pay respect to the people that deserve respect,” Pompeo explained about her decision to tell Shonda Rhimes, the creator of the show, she would be asking for more money.
Rhimes’ team then showed the star the series’ statistics, which helped Pompeo plead her case.
“I see exactly how much ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ makes for ABC/Disney,” she said. “I get to see the number. It’s my face, it’s my voice. I’ve done so much work promoting the show all over the world for the past 20 years. I am the Disney princess of that franchise.”
But after stepping back from “Grey’s Anatomy,” Pompeo had no trouble landing a new gig. Her new Hulu series “Good American Family” debuts on Wednesday.