Real-Life Love
Ellen Pompeo Reveals How Her Husband Handled Her ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Romance With Patrick Dempsey
Ellen Pompeo is finally coming clean. After starring in Grey’s Anatomy for almost 20 years, she is starring in a brand-new new project, Good American Family. While on the Call Her Daddy podcast, she also gave away some personal insight regarding her relationship with longtime husband Chris Ivery.
In a relationship prior to landing the hit medical drama, the couple never saw her meteoric rise to fame coming. Meredith Grey’s wildly popular onscreen romance with Patrick Dempsey‘s character Derek Shepherd became the TV relationship everyone talked about. MerDer evolved into one of television’s all-time great ‘ships, and her husband just had to watch.
Or did he?
Ron Tom / ABC / Everett Collection
Pompeo revealed to host Alex Cooper that her “insane” chemistry with Dempsey never truly bothered her husband because “Chris really never watched the show.” She said, “I was with him before Grey’s, so Grey’s kinda came out of nowhere for us. And I just think we were on this crazy ride that we were just trying to hang on for dear life, you know?”
The 55-year-old star admitted that her onscreen chemistry with Dempsey never caused problems for them. It was the flack they got from the tabloids. Pompeo clarified, “The part of it that was more intense for me, even more than that was back to the tabloid stuff of like how they started attacking him, you know, and bringing up his past things and a record that he had and stuff that he did.”
She continued, “We don’t need to get into a whole racial breakdown here, but like, you know, the truth is young black men in this country aren’t given the same opportunities as everybody else. And a lot of people come from rough neighborhoods. I came from a rough neighborhood. I did plenty of dirt when I was young. I won’t get into that here. But you know, the truth is publicly he was sort of meant, you know, the racial was really something that he never asked for.”
The actress said she felt “bad” about how “the media was really mean to him and really biased because how dare this skinny, blonde, petite little woman be with this tall black man? The visual of that, I think America wasn’t ready for that.” To further establish the horror they had to endure, Pompeo ended her statement with, “The mail that I used to get, the racist, hateful, violent mail that ABC would get because of that.”
Pompeo and her music producer husband have been married since 2007. They have two daughters, Stella and Sienna, and a son, Eli.
Good American Family, Series Premiere, March 19, Hulu
