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Actress Ellen Pompeo has an interesting connection with Michel Gondry’s 2004 movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. For the unversed, the Grey’s Anatomy actress was in the script of the movie, but her scenes were not included in the final draft. She played Joel Barish’s girlfriend, Naomi.
The deleted scenes from the movie are available on YouTube at the time of writing. Pompeo was at the Tribeca Festival Storytellers affair on June 14, 2025, where she spoke to journalist Katie Couric. She said:
“And Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, yeah? Which I got completely cut, got completely cut out of because Kate Winslet is in the movie, of course, like you have Kate Winslet, you definitely don't need me.”
In 2019, Jim Carrey, who played Barish, and Gondry sat down for an interview with Vanity Fair. The interview piece mentioned that Ellen Pompeo looked similar to Carrey's ex-partner, Renée Zellweger, with whom he severed ties just before the movie. Speaking to the magazine, he said:
“I was pretty hurt. Michel likes to have real feelings in the scene and real chemistry, so he hired Ellen Pompeo, who’s a wonderful actress. But she reminded me completely of Renée. Her look was similar. And I said, B**tard! And it ends up that she’s not even in the movie.”
Meanwhile, Michel Gondry weighed in, saying:
“I don’t think they look alike.”
Jim Carrey said he and Ellen Pompeo shared surprisingly strong on-screen chemistry. He felt it was so intense that if her scenes had been included in the film, it might have taken attention away from the character of Clementine.
Ellen Pompeo on hurting her foot and working in Good American Family
According to People Magazine, when Couric asked what happened to her foot, Ellen Pompeo explained she had jumped out of bed too quickly while half-asleep and landed the wrong way on her foot, calling it a clumsy move.
She added that this kind of thing had happened to her before, and joked that it had almost become her party trick. One similar incident happened back during the second season of Grey’s Anatomy, after an exhausting day of filming.
The actress recently starred in Good American Family alongside Mark Duplass. Speaking about the show with Kelly Clarkson in March 2025, she said:
“We are doing a fictionalized version of a story that was told on a documentary. We're telling it quite differently. And we are telling it from a lot of different perspectives. You know, I hope everybody likes it. It was a cool project to work on for my first thing in 20 years, I haven't done anything new.”
Ellen Pompeo discussed a book she read called Far From the Tree, which explored stories of parents whose children turned out different from what they had imagined.
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Each chapter focused on different situations, like the parents of Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold, Jeffrey Dahmer’s parents, or families with children born blind, deaf, or with dwarfism. She reflected on how, as women, whether they have had children or not, there was often an instinct to nurture.
The book made her think about what happens when one is faced with circumstances they never anticipated and how challenging that can be emotionally.
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