14 DAY TRIAL // Medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy” is still going strong despite the fact that it’s been on air for so many years and no one is happier she came back to it season after season than Ellen Pompeo. Isaiah Washington and Katherine Heigl were suckers for leaving when they did, the actress says in a new interview with the New York Post.
Fans of the series probably recall that Washington was fired after he referred to co-star TR Knight a homophobic slur and then refused to apologize, which precipitated his departure.
Heigl, on the other hand, left entirely on her own, thinking her transition to the big screen would be effortless. She burned all the bridges behind her and thus made sure she couldn’t fall back on “Grey’s” in case the Hollywood thing didn’t work out.
As Pompeo sees it, both should have been more careful before throwing a good thing like the series in the garbage can.
“Hurt feelings, combined with instant success and huge paychecks started things spinning out of control. The crazier things got, as I watched all the tumult with Isaiah and then the Katie thing, I started to focus on the work. Maybe it is my Boston, blue-collar upbringing. I just tried to not pay attention to all the noise around me,” Ellen says.
“You could understand why [Heigl] wanted to go — when you're offered $12 million [€8.84 million] a movie and you're only 26. But Katie’s problem is that she should not have renewed her contract. She re-upped, took a big raise, and then tried to get off the show. And then her movie career did not take off,” she continues.
As for Washington and the way he pretty much sabotaged his own career, the actress believes things got bad when he learned that producers wanted him to play Pompeo’s love interest, but the idea was discarded afterwards.
He probably stopped caring for the project afterwards, which is why he didn’t make a single attempt to not be fired.
Ellen, for one, is happy she kept her cool throughout everything and did her job as she was contractually bound to.
“I have an amazing life. I have a house five minutes from the studio, I have a house in the Hamptons, a house in Malibu, a beautiful daughter whom I see every night, and it’s all because I didn’t leave Grey’s Anatomy,” she says.