After cementing herself in TV history as Dr. Meredith Grey, Ellen Pompeo is making a big pivot for her next project.
The actress — who has fronted Grey’s Anatomy since 2005, though she’s no longer a full-time castmember — is starring in Hulu’s Good American Family, based on the real-life story surrounding Natalia Grace. For those who haven’t consumed media around the real-life case, Natalia — a 7-year-old Ukrainian orphan with dwarfism — was adopted by American couple Kristine and Michael Barnett in 2010 and abandoned by them a year later when they began to believe she was an adult who was conning them.
Pompeo, who also serves as an executive producer, plays Kristine, and told The Hollywood Reporter at the show‘s premiere on Thursday that after 20 years as Meredith Grey, “I definitely wanted to do something that was completely different from what I’ve been doing for a long time and this came along.”
She added that she didn’t know much about the story before signing on, having not seen The Curious Case of Natalia Grace documentary, but “then I got the script and read it and was blown away by the first episode.”
It’s a complicated story with several conflicting viewpoints, and the series uses a unique approach to reflect that. Explained creator/co-showrunner Katie Robbins, “I came up with the idea of starting the series in the perspective of Kristine and Michael Barnett, and then at a certain point that shifts, and all of a sudden all of the things that we thought were fact we start to question. In that way, we start to grapple with our own biases in this unexpected ways.”
Mark Duplass, who plays Michael Barnett, said that approach was what sold him, because upon initially hearing about the show he says, “I was skeptical. I read a lot about this story and I was like, ‘Why are we going to do another ripped-from-the-headlines miniseries — why do we need this, other than to just go make money? I have 500 movies and TV shows in my queue and so do you, like what’s this all about?’ And they were awesome because they challenged me right back and were like, ‘What do you really know about this story?’”
The team didn’t talk to any of the real people involved in the story, but had an extensive research team feeding them info. Newcomer Imogen Faith Reid, 27, plays Natalia, and being from the U.K. she didn’t know about the story until she auditioned.
Of not reaching out to the real-life subject — who is now 21 — Reid added, “I wanted to make sure that I played my own version of Natalia and I wanted to make sure that she was shown with empowerment, that light was seen and just that fight for justice.”
Good American Family starts streaming March 19 on Hulu.
By Kirsten Chuba