\n<\/p>\n
At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art<\/a>, Ellen Pompeo<\/a> stood in a room of Picassos, mostly in the Cubist style. She paused in front of a portrait of a woman<\/a> in a blue dress. The eyes were at strange angles, the mouth tucked to one side. The nose was somehow everywhere.<\/p>\n Pompeo, 55, tilted her head, trying to resolve the features into one coherent face. Then she gave up.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s three sides to every story,\u201d she said. \u201cOr six sides. Or nine. That is why art keeps us alive: Because everybody gets to see things their way, to make sense of them.\u201d<\/p>\n For a long time Pompeo\u2019s Hollywood story has been a simple one, the perspective fixed. She modeled sporadically throughout her 20s, had a starring role in one film and smaller parts in others. Since 2005 she has led the most popular medical show of the post-\u201cER\u201d era, ABC\u2019s \u201cGrey\u2019s Anatomy.\u201d<\/a> Pompeo plays the surgeon Meredith Grey, a sturdy moral center in a fervid, ethically uncertain world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In the intervening years, barring a handful of crossover episodes on \u201cStation 19,\u201d a \u201cGrey\u2019s\u201d sister show, Pompeo has amassed few other credits \u2014 a \u201cDoc McStuffins\u201d voice-over here, an appearance in a Taylor Swift video there. It wasn\u2019t that she lacked artistic ambitions, but the \u201cGrey\u2019s\u201d schedule was punishing and spending her brief hiatus making movies felt irresponsible, especially after she became a mother. (She and her husband, Chris Ivery, who works in marketing, have three children.)<\/p>\n In 2022, she renegotiated her \u201cGrey\u2019s\u201d contract, reducing the number of episodes she would appear in. This allowed for her first new substantive role in nearly two decades, as a flawed suburban supermom named Kristine Barnett, in \u201cGood American Family,\u201d a limited series that premieres on Hulu on Wednesday.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Based on the real case of an adoption gone very wrong, \u201cGood American Family<\/a>\u201d is told from multiple perspectives. In some, Kristine is the wronged, imperiled victim. In others, she is the villain. As with a Picasso, the viewer is left to make sense of it all.<\/p>\n While Pompeo waits for the show to debut and anticipates the 20th anniversary of \u201cGrey\u2019s Anatomy,\u201d on March 27, she is reckoning with the picture of her own career \u2014 the choices she has made, the reasons for those choices. Having played one role for so long, she knows that her fans may resist seeing her in anything but scrubs. Still, she felt she had to try on something new.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been dying for something else to do for years,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve always wanted another opportunity. I finally have it. Yes, it\u2019s scary. It might be the craziest, dumbest thing. But I\u2019m going to trust in the universe.\u201d<\/p>\n Pompeo, who had suggested the LACMA outing, arrived at the museum in the early afternoon, dressed in California mom chic \u2014 a trench coat over a sweatshirt and corduroy pants, with corduroy sneakers to match. Her lips were slick with a Rhode balm that Hailey Bieber personally sends her.<\/p>\n On that January day, the wildfires were still burning and the air quality was dire, though Pompeo\u2019s Malibu home had survived the worst of it. \u201cFor now,\u201d she said stoically.<\/p>\n In person, Pompeo is sharp, sardonic, coolly wise. She is a woman who knows her own worth and expects others to know it, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She has a reputation, entirely deserved, for brass and spunk and candor. Katie Robbins (\u201cSunny<\/a>\u201d), the creator and co-showrunner of \u201cGood American Family,\u201d described her as a \u201csalty, salty, salty broad.\u201d Mark Duplass<\/a>, her co-star on the show, called her \u201ca badass Boston bitch in all the right ways.\u201d Shonda Rhimes<\/a>, the creator of \u201cGrey\u2019s Anatomy\u201d and many other shows, complimented \u201can underbelly of toughness to her, which works well with how warm she is.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n If Pompeo is a tough cookie, she is also a surprisingly philosophical one. When she was 4, her mother died of an accidental overdose of prescription painkillers. So while she spends a fair amount of time thinking about why her life has worked out the way it has, she does not often question it.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s my fate,\u201d she said repeatedly during our conversation. \u201cIt\u2019s my fate.\u201d<\/p>\n This fate was not especially predictable. Growing up in a working-class Boston suburb, Pompeo didn\u2019t have much exposure to the arts, though she loved movies \u2014 especially the Michelle Pfeiffer canon \u2014 and the aunt that she is named for brought her to see Broadway musicals. After high school, she followed friends to Miami and worked in bars. Offers of modeling took her to New York, though she knew she wasn\u2019t destined to model. She was too short, too mouthy.<\/p>\n \u201cI had too much to say and too many opinions,\u201d she said. So she gave acting a try.<\/p>\n Soon she booked a sassy L\u2019Oreal commercial<\/a>, which brought her to the attention of casting directors and agents. Her first major role, in 2002, was in Brad Silberling\u2019s weepie \u201cMoonlight Mile.\u201d Her reviews were strong<\/a>, but the film underperformed.<\/p>\n \u201cWhich was the best thing that never happened because I probably would have been a complete [expletive],\u201d she said. There were other roles, a few substantial (2003\u2019s \u201cOld School\u201d), but editing whittled others away to nothing.<\/p>\n Offered television pilots, she passed on them \u2014 she wanted to be a movie star not a TV actress. But a couple of years after \u201cMoonlight Mile,\u201d she was broke. Her agent encouraged her to make the pilot for \u201cGrey\u2019s Anatomy\u201d so that she could make her rent. Pilots almost never get picked up, he told her. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n And then this one was. \u201cThere\u2019s your fate,\u201d Pompeo told me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For Rhimes, it also seemed like fate. Imagining an actress for Meredith, she asked her casting director to find her someone like the girl in \u201cMoonlight Mile.\u201d The casting director told her she could have the girl in \u201cMoonlight Mile.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere was a spirit about her,\u201d Rhimes said. \u201cThere\u2019s a quality about her that welcomes you in.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGrey\u2019s,\u201d in turn, was almost too welcoming. The money was good, especially after the first season, when Pompeo stood up for herself and renegotiated her contract.<\/p>\n \u201cI gradually learned through other women teaching me, Shonda Rhimes telling me, to ask for what I deserve,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n While the hours were long, they were regular, and the show shot in Los Angeles, where she lived. Gradually, she gave up her movie dreams. Then she gave up hoping for an Emmy, even though she thinks she should have been nominated for a couple. \u201cBut it wasn\u2019t my fate,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Her feelings about her work on \u201cGrey\u2019s\u201d are mixed. \u201cSome seasons I was so ready and drastically excited and motivated. Other seasons, I was like, How am I going to get through this?\u201d she said. She seems to have kept this exhaustion from her colleagues.<\/p>\n \u201cI enjoy seeing her get giddy about things and to have a good time and to look for ways to have fun,\u201d said Chandra Wilson, another original cast member.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A decade in, Pompeo no longer found the show creatively fulfilling. \u201cNo, not at all,\u201d she said. She founded a production company, Calamity Jane, but failed to sell the projects she developed. She began to believe that she would never have another role.<\/p>\n After the pandemic lockdowns, she wondered if it might not be better to have no role at all. Financially secure but creatively frustrated, she thought about quitting \u201cGrey\u2019s\u201d altogether.<\/p>\n \u201cI couldn’t keep going,\u201d she said. But she also couldn\u2019t picture the show going on without her.<\/p>\n Dana Walden, who was then the chairwoman for entertainment at Walt Disney Television, heard her out. She allowed Pompeo to reduce her episodes by more than half. And she suggested that a show coming to Hulu, a Disney subsidiary, would be perfect for her: \u201cGood American Family.\u201d<\/p>\n The series is inspired by the real-life case of a Midwestern couple who adopted a girl with a rare form of dwarfism and then left her on her own. At first, Pompeo wasn\u2019t sold on \u201cGood American Family,\u201d which hovers somewhere between fact and fiction as it offers multiple perspectives. (A hefty disclaimer at the start of each episode describes it as reflecting and dramatizing conflicting points of view rather than arguing for a definitive truth.)<\/p>\n She has little appetite for true crime and worried that the story might come across as \u201ca little tabloid-y,\u201d she said. And she didn\u2019t want to play a character who in some versions of the narrative mistreats a child. What if her own children saw the show?<\/p>\n But her agent convinced her. Kristine was so different from Meredith that it would show audiences, instantly, that Pompeo was a real actress, not just a familiar face in blue scrubs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Yet that familiarity is a useful tool. It helps viewers to side with Kristine, at least at first.<\/p>\n \u201cWe benefit from people coming in with a great love for her,\u201d Robbins, the showrunner, said. \u201cWe needed someone who you trusted, who you believed in and wanted to root for, who you felt like aligned with.\u201d Pompeo had that.<\/p>\n Duplass, whose family is obsessed with \u201cGrey\u2019s Anatomy,\u201d saw it, too.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat a beautiful weapon,\u201d he said. \u201cShe knows the trust that audiences have in her, and she wields it carefully for a character who\u2019s much more morally dubious.\u201d<\/p>\n Pompeo\u2019s approach to the role was similar to what she does on \u201cGrey\u2019s\u201d: She tried to find the truth in each scene, to work hard, to treat the cast and crew fairly. She often mentors young women, in part because she could have used that mentorship when she was younger. Imogen Faith Reid, the actress who plays the adopted girl in \u201cGood American Family,\u201d appreciated that care.<\/p>\n \u201cShe would remind me that I could always speak up and have a voice,\u201d Reid said. \u201cIt was just so amazing to hear.\u201d<\/p>\n By the time Pompeo rolled up to LACMA, all that work was done. What would come next was out of her control.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cMaybe people will watch this and hate it,\u201d she said. Or maybe they would love it, and then other scrubs-less roles would come. There were so many other women in that room of Picassos \u2014 seated women, weeping women. There were dozens of perspectives to explore.<\/p>\n However \u201cGood American Family\u201d is received, Pompeo will make peace with it. No, she doesn\u2019t have the awards or the fashion campaigns or the prestige of an A-list movie star. But she has the respect of her peers and the love of her fans. And she has her family. It\u2019s enough.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m so happy with what I\u2019ve done,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m happy with my fate.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n