Ellen Pompeo can’t understand President Donald Trump’s “aggression” and wants to know “how long is the hard-on going to last?” when it comes to his sweeping deportation policies and military raids.
“The simplest answer is, we need more women in power and more women in leadership,” the “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Good American Family” star said during a fireside chat with Katie Couric at Tribeca Festival on Saturday, the same day that the “No Kings” protests were taking place across the United States. “These guys are all so angry. What is happening? I don’t know, have a sandwich, smoke a joint, chill the fuck out. What is wrong? They all want to fight and bomb each other.”
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Pompeo went on to note that “women have [have] this emotional intelligence” and amid the Trump administration, “we’re dealing with a lot of low emotional intelligence and ego.” Though she added, “I can’t say all men, obviously. I’m sorry guys, I love you.”
“It’s really interesting that there’s so many people that feel aggression. And when, historically, has aggression ever served anybody?” Pompeo continued. “It didn’t work in Vietnam. It didn’t work in World War I. It didn’t work in World War II. All we ended up with is a bunch of dead soldiers and broken cities and bombed-out cities. What benefit has ever come from any of it? I guess the benefit of a few leaders having absolute power, they feel great, [but] OK, how long is the hard-on going to last? It’s not sustainable this kind of aggression, unless you blow everything up. It’s Jim Jones, ‘Let’s all drink the Kool-Aid and say goodbye.’”
Pompeo went on to explain her views on who we choose as our leaders and society’s “tendency to follow people.”
“People followed Jesus, he was probably a very charismatic guy, probably handsome and cool and probably a lot darker than they portray in all the images we see,” she said. “But clearly, he had some swag. People followed him, did everything he said and wrote about for hundreds of thousands of years after. Jesus looked like he was kind of hot. The leaders we have now don’t look like that. So we shouldn’t be living and dying by everything they say and following them the way they did Jesus.”
During her conversation with Couric, Pompeo spoke in depth about her longtime friendship and work partnership with “Grey’s Anatomy” creator Shonda Rhimes and revealed there were moments when her own team advised her to view Rhimes as a rival, which Pompeo fought against.
“I think the most important thing to note about Shonda and I’s relationship is we very easily could have been pitted against one another,” Pompeo said. “And there were plenty of instances where people on my team would suggest that, you know, it’s me against her, and I just, I believe that you get more with honey than you do with vinegar. And if someone proves and shows you who they are, then believe them.”
Pompeo also spoke about an issue currently heavily affecting the entertainment industry: the exodus of production from Los Angeles to other U.S. and even international cities.
“We’re not filming a lot in Los Angeles. The government of California, the city of Los Angeles, has not provided the right tax incentives for people who do want to make content in Los Angeles. That’s wrong,” Pompeo said, adding that “it’s a little bit too late now” for much to be done and how many people across the industry — including below-the-line and behind-the-scenes workers — are harmed by the move.
“Let’s change it, like, yesterday, but it’s too late now, because the truth is, these people have spent billions of dollars building studios everywhere else,” Pompeo said. “They’re not going to just not use those studios and those places that built studios in other places, whether it’s Ireland, whether it’s New Jersey, whether it’s Atlanta, Toronto, those places are incentivized to want film production to go there. So whatever Los Angeles is going to come down to, they’re going to beat it. So for a town who built itself on an industry, they let it slip away really easily. And I’m not really sure how that happened, but it’s devastating.”
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