Ellen Pompeo Interview: Skinny state of affairs

Raking over details of Ellen Pompeo’s private life looms as a less than enviable task.

When she arrives for this interview during a break from filming medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, Pompeo has the demeanour of someone who’d rather be in a dentist’s chair than subjecting herself to questions about life in front of and away from the camera.

It becomes apparent Pompeo, who plays angst-ridden intern and Dr McDreamy’s (Patrick Dempsey) forbidden squeeze, Meredith Grey, is struggling to recover from the previous day’s shooting schedule.

She and Dempsey were on set until after midnight.

It can also be draining, Pompeo says with a yawn, wading through scripts on a drama that specialises in fracturing, mending, then fracturing again the romantic lives of its key characters. “The good thing about the show, I will say, is that we’re supposed to look and be tired because we’re playing interns,” Pompeo says, revealing a tension-breaking smile.

“Sometimes I look in the mirror and think, ‘Oh, God’. Your eyes are the first things that go when you’re that tired. So, as a girl, I feel a little like I maybe don’t look so great all the time.”

It seems Pompeo, like so many of her Hollywood contemporaries, is deeply concerned about body image.

She recoils in her chair, momentarily clenching her teeth, when quizzed about claims she has an eating disorder.

She is aware that, among celebrities in Los Angeles, a competition seems to have developed between women who just don’t desire to be thin, but want to look like they belong on a greyhound track.

It’s been billed as a race for the Incredible Shrinking Woman title and it’s been suggested Pompeo is coming a close tie with Victoria Beckham, Nicole Richie and Calista Flockhart.

“You know, I think this is a very sensitive topic,” Pompeo says. “I’ve been accused of having an eating disorder and the reason it’s dangerous is because, obviously, I don’t have an eating disorder.

“The thing is, if you can recall a picture of someone four years ago and they were 50 pounds heavier or 40 pounds heavier, I get it.

“In my first movie, my second movie, my third movie, you’ll never see me any bigger than I am now. I look the same all the time. But the reason why it upsets me is because there are girls who do have eating disorders and attention must be called to it. But the problem is when people don’t and they’re accused of it.

“You know, I get fan mail from 13- to 14-year-old girls, and if they look up to me and think I’m not being healthy, that worries me.

“I don’t want a little 13-year-old to think that I’m starving myself to look this way. If I’m her idol and she thinks I’m anorexic, then my goodness, you know, we have just affected a young little mind.

“I know the truth, and that’s OK. I have a blessed life and I’ll get over it. But I don’t want girls to do that because they think I’m doing that. That’s really disturbing and for that reason I have made an extended effort to go to the gym. I mean, I eat as much as I can possibly eat, but I’ve gone to the gym and tried to build up my muscles for those girls who might look up to me.”

Pompeo is concerned she’s coming across as moaning about the so-called pressures of stardom.

She will not pretend she enjoys some aspects of her life-in-a-fishbowl existence, but is adamant she’ll be eternally grateful for what Grey’s Anatomy has done for her.

“I’m going to enjoy my life. I only get one chance at this, and it won’t last for ever,” she says. “Any minute there will be another show, and good for them. They’ll get to have their day in the sun.”

So committed is Pompeo to Grey’s that she has no burning desire to make movies. A pile of film scripts is in her kitchen, but she has rejected them in the interests of her TV role.

“We don’t have a lot of downtime,” she says of the TV show commitments. “The two previous hiatuses I couldn’t even think, I was so exhausted. And I thought it was just crazy to think of working during my break.

“The break is only eight weeks. And my fear is that even if I feel like I have the energy, I don’t want to come back to Grey’s and be tired. I don’t think it’s fair to my cast members or fair to the show,” she says of her downtime.

Channel 7 made the daring step of scheduling Grey’s Anatomy in the Sunday, 8.30pm timeslot, so viewers would be forced to make the unenviable choice between Grey’s and Channel 9’s top-rating CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Pompeo hopes fans will be eager to see how Meredith Grey negotiates the tortured relationship she has with Dr Derek Shepherd. “I think, emotionally, Meredith has quite a way to go, which is very true to a lot of these medical students who spend so much of their lives in school,” Pompeo says.

“The focus is so much on the academic. The emotional part is sort of secondary to the books.”

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