Ellen Pompeo has been put through the wringer.
The longtime Grey’s Anatomy star reflected on her time in Hollywood, noting the undue attention that has been paid to her body over the years.
“I was so skinny and I hated it and everyone thought I had an eating disorder,” Ellen explained to People in an interview published Feb. 26. “It was a whole situation with how skinny I was, and there was so much negative attention.”
“Girls today can be gorgeous and thin and thank God we’re not allowed to comment on women’s bodies, even though people do,” she continued. “But I just had so much anxiety and lacked self-esteem because people were so critical of my physicality.”
The 55-year-old—who shares Stella, 17, Sienna, 11, and Eli, 8, with husband Chris Ivery—specifically called out tabloids who “would say horrible things” about her weight, which caused her to dread public events.
“I just remember being so anxious on red carpets, and the comments about my weight and my body,” Ellen shared. “I’m so glad, maybe, hopefully things have changed, because it was much, much more brutal 20 years ago.”
The actress—who has played Meredith Grey on all 21 seasons of Grey’s since it debuted in 2005—added that she’s become “pretty resilient” after all of these years of working in the industry.
“I’m sort of like a blue-collar worker, right?” she posited. “I go to a TV show, and I’m not the cool kid or the popular kid necessarily. I’m kind of a worker bee. I think that’s been good for me.”
That being said, Ellen is in the midst of a new era for her acting career, which will see her take on her first major role since joining the Shonda Rhimes hit 20 years ago when she plays Natalia Grace’s adopted mother in the upcoming Hulu series Good American Family.
And Ellen has long been open about her desire to take on other projects as she continues to expand her career.
“I gotta mix it up a little bit,” she said on The Drew Barrymore Show in 2022. “I’m 53, my brain is like scrambled eggs. I gotta do something new. You can’t do The New York Times crossword puzzle every single day.”
“I mean 19 years, that’s more than people keep their kids in their house,” Ellen continued. “People keep their kids in their house until they’re 18 and then they send them off to college, so this is like me like going away to college.”