Grey’s Anatomy: when Ellen Pompeo insulted Denzel Washington on the set

From the end of October to the beginning of November 2015, Ellen Pompeo shoots for the 12th consecutive year the medical series Grey’s Anatomy, of which she is of course the main actress. For this episode, the 9th of the season, the direction is provided by Denzel Washington and the character of Pompeo, Meredith, is violently assaulted there and has his jaw broken by a patient.

The latter, played by Dohn Norwood, attacks Meredith, who spends a large part of the episode in care to have her jaw repaired. It was during the filming of her confrontation with her attacker that things went wrong.

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Norwood plays this scene of the aggressor’s apology to his victim without looking Ellen Pompeo in the eye, and, playing her character under attack, the actress improvises this line: “Look at me when you apologize, look at me!” That’s when the director steps in, criticizing this unexpected addition to the script. Pompeo says:

He said to me: “I’m the director, don’t tell me what to do”, and I said to him: “Listen fuck, this is my series, my set, you know who you are talk? You barely know where the toilet is! “

The interpreter of Malcolm X was perhaps surprised by this interpretation of the actress since at this moment of the scenario, Meredith cannot speak (her injury is still too much alive) and the line improvised by Pompeo took her out of her character.

Paramount Pictures France

That being said, it should be remembered that in the United States, the serial director of a large network (here, ABC) is often only a performer and Denzel Washington is only the director of a episode where Ellen Pompeo has been carrying the show for (at the time of the mentioned filming) 254 episodes and 12 consecutive years.

The actress was therefore successful since in the sequence finally kept, Norwood apologizes staring Meredith in the eyes while she can only express herself with her gaze and her emotion. The episode is aptly called “A deafening silence“.

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