Ellen Pompeo Was “Deeply Against” This Recent Grey’s Anatomy Storyline

Ellen Pompeo has played Meredith Grey for two decades and counting — and when you spend that much time in a character’s head, you get to know them pretty well. That’s why the Grey’s Anatomy star took issue with a recent Season 21 storyline, she shared in a new interview.

An Ethical Dilemma

“I don’t always have a say in the choices the character makes,” Pompeo told Variety, chatting with the magazine in honor of her newly minted star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on April 29. “And writers will initially service a plot before they might stop to think, ‘Would the Meredith Grey that [Ellen] built — would she make that choice?’”

Pompeo went on to point out a recent time she was “deeply against a choice that Meredith was making.”

In Season 21’s “Jump (for My Love)” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” Meredith and Nick travel to Seattle to work on a liver transplant for a young professor named Tasha. However, they soon discover that her wife, Evynn — played by a visiting Lena Waithe — has been hiding Tasha’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, which could affect whether she’s a candidate for a transplant.

Meredith says the omission is “unfair” to other patients on the transplant list, and later leaves Tasha’s fate up to a committee. It’s the “ethical thing to do,” she tells Nick — who’s surprised by her sudden adherence to the rules. Perfectly summing up decades of Grey’s lore in a succinct read, he replies, “You’ve made a career out of finding ways around protocols.”

Nick ultimately sorts out a way for Tasha to get a partial transplant — sharing the donor liver with another patient. But behind the scenes, Pompeo was surprised that things ever got to that point.

The character she’s developed over the years “would have always been like, ‘I’m pissed that you lied, [but] let’s figure out how to game the system together to get you this f*cking liver. F*ck the system. The system is broken,’” she told Variety. “Instead, Meredith chooses, for some reason, to be mad and snitch and tell UNOS and tell the board that she lied and that she shouldn’t get the liver — when Meredith has subverted the system for 20 years to do the right thing.”

Indeed, Meredith is no stranger to rule-breaking on Grey’s Anatomy — like when she tampered with Derek’s Alzheimer’s trial to ensure that Adele Webber got experimental medicine to potentially treat her condition, instead of a placebo.

Why She’ll Always Speak Up

Pompeo’s concerns — which she ultimately worked through with Waithe’s help, Variety notes — stemmed from “caring deeply about the show,” she explained.

“I see my job as trying to keep Shonda Rhimes’ legacy as good and solid as we can,” she continued, “and the minute you stop caring or phoning it in or getting lazy, we’re not really doing what we’ve been paid to do.”

And she’ll keep fighting for Meredith. Though Pompeo recently branched out by starring in Good American Family, she expressed to Variety that she plans to stick around the world of Grey’s for one key reason.

“Them having the ability to use my voice, my likeness, my image, 47 billion minutes a year and not paying me a penny wouldn’t really feel great to me,” she said of the show’s continued broadcast and streaming success.