Ellen Pompeo says Grey's Anatomy might end this season, blames long hours on set for actors' bad behavior

Variety

“We don’t know when the show is really ending yet,” says Pompeo, who is in the last year of her contract, in a Variety cover story on the Shonda Rhimes medical drama. “But the truth is, this year could be it.” She adds: “I’m constantly fighting for the show as a whole to be as good as it can be. As a producer, I feel like I have permission to be able to do that. I mean, this is the last year of my contract right now. I don’t know that this is the last year? But it could very well could be.” Pompeo also admits there was, early on, "a lot of drama on-screen and drama off-screen, and young people navigating intense stardom for the first time in their lives. I think that a lot of those actors, if they could go back in time and talk to their younger selves, it would be a different thing. Everybody’s grown and changed and evolved — but it was an intense time.” Pompeo says that the coronavirus pandemic should serve as a wake-up call that long hours hurt the actors. “Nobody should be working 16 hours a day, 10 months a year — nobody,” she says. “And it’s just causing people to be exhausted, pissed, sad, depressed. It’s a really, really unhealthy model. And I hope post-COVID nobody ever goes back to 24 or 22 episodes a season...It’s why people get sick. It’s why people have breakdowns. It’s why actors fight! You want to get rid of a lot of bad behavior? Let people go home and sleep.”